Loudness was something to strive for then sure but it wasn't crushing the dynamics out of music the way we've been doing since the 90's. Digital made that possible so older vinyl records will have much greater dynamic range.

Personally my preference for vinyl is packaging. I like large art, liner notes, and lyrics. I also like that it encourages me to make listening my main activity instead of using music as background noise. In these areas vinyl is superior but I don't think any medium is overall better than another. They're useful for different things. I subscribe to two streaming services and have headphones on most of the day. Without digital streaming I'd spend half the day flipping records and going crazy.

For what is worth, this is what I heard a vinyl fan say about this: "Since the needle changes the disk, every time you play a vinyl you are effectively listening to it for the first time. DVDs can't do that"

Needle skipping is also the original reason for mid/side (or in old terms, lateral/vertical) style processing - in a stereo record groove, anything mono is equal on both sides, hence in the 'mid(dle)' of the mix. Anything panned is more prominent on one side than another. Compressing the mid and side differently allows you to maximise the stereo-ness of the record without as much effect on the overall mix, and without throwing the needle off to the side. When multi-channel recordings first came out, they originally mixed different instruments to different channels instead of trying to create a cohesive single image. It was basically between headphones and the quest for loudness that engineers found that you can get 'more' out of the record with a (now-traditional) centre-focused mix.