The waveform seems to me more like normalized than totally squashed. Somewhat heavy on the compressor but still better dynamics than Death Magnetic.

In any case, the 80% use case for a laptop microphone is not to record music or even podcasts.

It's teleconferences, voice notes, voice recognition, and such. You don't want subtle dynamics and losing what's being said. You want heavy noice suppresion and automatic gain control.