Compression reduces the range between the lower and the higher level so your ears are faced to a more or less "constant" pressure. Personally when I was into home production I only dared eating the peaks with a limiter and reasonable settings, e.g to gain one or two db, never more.

On top of that another problem with compression is that it is not neutral, bad compressors, especially in the digital domain can introduce aliasing.

Also search for the "loudness war". This is how we called the problem back in the mid 2000's.