> the kick and bass do not line up exactly. You never hear that in a contemporary pop mix anymore. That is not because musicians lost the ability to play together.

Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up? This is the most forced claudism I've seen in a long time.

Looks like a standard editing mistake to me. The previous sentence probably used to say something like ‘musicians used to not be able to play together’ but when it was edited the editor forgot to update the next sentence for coherence. Editing long-form text is hard :)

>Why would losing the ability to play together cause the kick and bass to line up?

Because if they lost the ability to play together, then they would be forced to either overdub tracks played individually with a click track, OR use midi, in both of which cases the kick and bass typically lines up.

So what this say, is we get this exact "perfect line up" now, but not because musicians lost the ability to play together and sound naturally, but because we prefer these other two production techniques and audio processing that removes all natural nuance.

That is a weird phrase.

I can only make sense of it as "musicians are so bad at playing together that we don't try". If say the bass player cannot play with others I'm going to record them playing each chord/note in isolation, and then use that as midi samples to track. Do that to everything and you get perfectly lined up music. If you can play together "good enough" then I'm not going to do that.