Reminds me of Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight. In addition to the hi-fi recording lines, there was basically a phone line designed to allow the sound engineer in the booth and the musician(s) to talk 2-way. Collins liked the effect it gave so they rigged up a way to pipe that audio into the desk. It gives his vocal performance a distant, numb feeling that reinforces the theme of antipathy. Because the equipment was worse.

I'll tell another one: The first time I ever heard The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it was an mp3 my father downloaded. He managed to find a version that sounded like it was taped off of the radio and then the tape played into the PC capturing at a low bitrate. It's my definitive version of the track; the result sounds foggy and mysterious like it's being played from somewhere in the fog across the lake, it bolsters the legend of the piece.

It absolutely is not. Albums aren't mixed to be listened to on studio monitors, they are mixed to sound good on consumer grade speakers because that's where people listen to music. Nowadays if you're listening on air pods that's probably the way it was meant to be listened to.

every studio has different equipment

That's why flat monitors and sound dampening are important.

A lot of money is spent to try and make a neutral room.

From my limited understanding (and what I just read up right now), if you send audio through non-flat-response speakers multiple times (so stick a mic in front of the speaker to re-record it, and play it back through the speakers again) then each time your highs and lows would become more silent and the mids would become louder.
They're designed as the last piece in the chain, to then give some artistic coloring to the music.

Flat response is designed to not do that, so that what comes out sounds as much as possible like what you've put in.

In my personal experience as a very hobbyist musician, yes, of course I will also try to listen to my shit on phone speakers and try to make it not sound entirely terrible there. But you go from one consumer-grade speaker to the next and entirely different frequency ranges are fucked up.

Having some headphones that don't fuck with the sound (whether intentional or just crappy) is really helpful, because they give me a middleground that's likely to sound reasonable on multiple systems.
Much better than composing on a system that fucks it up in a specific way and then playing back on another system that fucks it up in a different way. That's pretty much guaranteed to sound terrible.

Yes, the point of mixing on flat monitors is so you eliminate as much bias as possible, and to make sure it will sound good regardless if you’re listening in the car or in an audiophile listening room. When you listen to music on flat response speakers as the consumer, you are listening to it with the least bias possible, meaning no enhancements of any kind. So you listen to it the way the artist/band, producer, and sound engineer mixed/mastered it.

It's nice to know the estates of all our beloved 90s icons are so well off today

Flat doesnt really have useful meaning with headphones due to everyone having a unique HRTF, even between each of their ears. So each set will sound different to each person, often dramatically so over 1 or 2khz.

But from the squigs, those 280 pros dont seem flat (if flat means diffuse field target), theyve got a big ol subbass boost