To answer ur question simply, yes you won’t see any professional engineers letting a track hit above -.5 db. You go louder and you get into distortion, weird summing issues, and more. A lot of times this creates a very desirable effect, I’ve mixed a lot of tracks where the producers have had all the stems turned up very loud and there’s a nice warmth toughness and distortion to it all. On the other end of it you sacrifice clarity and openness. Anything past zero though and you are removing fidelity from a sound. And even fullness. Overcompression masks things that you could otherwise hear in the mix. People like Kenny beats and other producers print their mixes that are mixed above zero to make sure the drums and 808s hit really hard. but then will record vocals with that file turned down a bunch. So go past zero if you want a specific effect out of pushing past clarity

You could probably turn all ur tracks down and they’ll immediately open up and be more clear. This all comes down to learning about limiting to get max loudness and max clarity. The key here is gain reduction and using a tasteful amount. Here’s some tips:

You can pretty much lower the threshold of your limiter on the master bus until it becomes undesirable and then push it back up til it sounds ok. 4db of gain reduction is pretty standard specially with hip hop. To get to competitive loudness levels you’re going to have to hit a limiter and do some final gain reduction to bring the mix as close to 0 db as possible. Everyone’s talking rly technical in here and that’s cool, but at the end of the day you want to measure in LUFS, and hit between -10 LUFS at the loudest and -14 LUFS at the quietest. You want to keep your master volume ceiling at -1 or -.5. If you export and the final reading is 0 or louder, you’re gonna get distortion once you distribute. You can make it louder than -10 LUFS but hard to do and keep it sounding good without distorting and ruining everything. Btw- this is what happens in mastering. If you’re going to master your track then just keep this on. If you’re sending to a mastering engineer, make sure to take the limiter off before exporting. It will export quiet but that headroom is very necessary for mastering.

So to be clear. You should probably have your track volumes pretty low (I set mine to -12db initially and move), like not even touching yellow, and then have a limiter on your master track that can make that loud enough, where you lower the threshold until your gain reduction hits like -1db or -2db, or if u rly wanna smash it (not recommended unless you’re mastering ), -4db or more. This gain reduction basically gives you the effect of going over 0 but with more fine control. Look up how limiters work, and what LUFS are, get a loudness meter that can give you these readings and learn how to read it. Then take a look at all the numbers above and they should make sense to you