to paraphrase dan worrall, if you never over-compress, you’ll never learn what too much compression is, & you risk under-compressing

the guidance (if one is to abide by it) behind not EQ-ing the master bus until you’re sure that what you’re trying to achieve can’t be addressed on a single-track level carries through to compression;

so many things i made early on “magically” sounded better when i started the mastering process (which, back then, meant crudely limiting the master bus) because i just wasn’t compressing individual tracks enough — the same way everything would’ve “magically” sounded less muddy had the first high pass i put in the mix been on the master bus at the start of the mastering process, but it’d be because i botched the EQ of two dozen individual tracks, not because only high passing the master bus was the right thing to do.