> The last time I tried Normalize on Spotify - it totally messed up dynamic range and made everything sound awful.

That must have been quite some time ago, Spotify has been doing normalization properly for over a year now - https://artists.spotify.com/en/help/article/loudness-normalization

I must‘ve used Spotify with that setting for all those years… damnit lol!

Well that's interesting, I also used it with the normalized setting. I for sure got used to it but will check it with it turned off.