I found the following page as a result of looking at the Wikipedia entry for dither, then onto Bob Katz mastering engineer and his commercial page.
https://www.digido.com/portfolio-item/back-to-analog/
My impressions, based on far less experience then his, are broadly in line with this.
Unless your impressions are misinterpretations/biases, how can they be inline with Bob Katz's experience/article?
Firstly, Bob Katz was talking about ADCs not DACs. There's a significant difference because an ADC typically needs far more precision, far lower digital artefacts than a DAC. This is because what comes out of an ADC is typically processed. An individual ADC channel may end up being amplified by as much as 1,000 times and therefore any artefacts from the ADC process also amplified by up to 1,000 times. On top of that it may go through numerous processing stages, each of which will add noise/artefacts. Once that's all done, it's fed to a DAC, the output of which is amplified for your headphones/speakers. In other words, any issues/non-linearities/artefacts with an ADC are likely to end up being far more noticeable, well into the audible range, than any similar level of issues with a DAC.
Secondly, you did notice that Bob was talking about MTRs and project studios? Digital MTRs (multi-track recorders) proliferated in the 1990s to early 2000s. They were enormously expensive in the 80s but a few companies started making some relatively cheap ones in the early 90's. By far the most famous was the Alesis Digital Audio Tape (ADAT) and it cost about $4k if I remember correctly, which sounds expensive but was about 1/20 the price of pro digital MTRs and 24trk 2" reel to reel machines of the time! It was 16/44 or 16/48 and was pretty good considering this vast difference in price point but it was effectively a pro-sumer device and compared to top of the line pro audio equipment the built-in ADCs and filters, jitter specs, etc., were dire. I tested one extensively for about a week when it first came out but it was a wasted week because I knew within a few minutes it was not even in the ball park of the sound quality I required/expected. Nevertheless, Alesis must have sold hundreds of thousands of ADAT machines by the late 90's and it was arguably the main driver of the explosion of project studios. Even some of the big studios ended up buying them, not to use as their primary recorder but simply because they started getting so many clients turning up and wanting their ADAT tapes mixed or mastered. This is what Bob Katz's article is about and in that context, at that time, I'd have heartily agreed with virtually everything he wrote but not today and not for quite a few years!
Again, you are quoting irrelevancies: ADCs rather than DACs and ADCs which existed more than half the life-time of digital audio ago, for only a relatively few number of years and which was only used for certain types of underground indie music productions. Nothing whatsoever to do with the premise against which you're arguing, of modern, competently designed DACs!
G