Surely tape saturation or the artifacts/tone coloring of vinyl records would have been a better example.

My thoughts as well. The main complaints I remember hearing about CDs were people claiming that they were “too clean” and didn’t have the same personality as analog formats

That quote is from Brian Eno’s 1996 book, so he knows his stuff.

I’m guessing he’s referring to early CDs when both mastering and player DACs had digital roughness. Or maybe he’s talking about digital clipping which was deliberately being introduced in the 1990s to create loudness.