It’s possible their compression settings were actually exaggerating the peaks instead of compressing them, and then they did nothing to control those peaks afte

It’s possible their compression settings were actually exaggerating the peaks instead of compressing them, and then they did nothing to control those peaks afterwards. This is a really common thing that can happen with a superficial use of compressors. Especially if you did averaged loudness-matching of the compressed signal with the uncompressed signal. It ends up being spikier than before compression. I would entirely believe a waveform with those added spikes would be more damaging than a controlled waveform that had been saturated or limited after compression. I don’t have access to the original publication, so I can’t check and find out.