The main source of undesirable harmonic distortion in recordings nowadays is D/A clipping because it's driven too hard.
I assume you mean A/D clipping?
No, D/A
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Imagine that you sample a sinusoid so that its peak reaches 0 dBFS.
Now, digitally, "amplify it" so that the peak would reach a higher level than 0 dBFS which, of course, you can't obtain with the D/A.
I have no inside info or other experience in that end of the recording industry, but this really surprises me because it is entirely unnecessary and indisputably leads to bad-sounding distortion. It's unnecessary because the compression and soft-limiting techniques have become much better and easier than they were in the early days of digital music media.
Of course! Bad sound! Listen to several recent pop songs and suffer
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BTW, obviously tape saturation does add distortion, but it's quasi-log (I'm guessing) saturation and not as harsh as the flat clipping you get with A/D overdrive.
And it can be beautiful. There are digital emulations of tape distortion. There are also emulations of lots of old analog gear that distorted in a particularly good way adding some "life" (call it however you want) to sound.
But I'm talking about overdriving by adding too much gain and brick wall limiting in the digital domain.