You are creating a false equivalence. How many tones, what frequency, etc. really does not matter if the artifacts are below human detectable limits which they appear for many products (not all) to be well below especially considering that loud sounds make quiet sounds at the same time impossible to hear.
w.r.t. "what you like", that is a matter of taste, not a matter of reproduction. Why would I spend 10, 20, 30K+ for a piece of equipment that colors the music in a fixed way (that I may not always like), when I could get equipment that has no audible artifacts and color it myself, based on my mood and what music I am listening too?
How does one even test for the right color, when most audiophiles don't adequately and certainly don't consistently do acoustics in their room so insisting on a test for flavor of a single component seems pointless and out of place. I would posit this is the failure of audio reviews, and reviewers and the ad-hoc ones on audiophile sites. The review of any component is just the end results of a collection of errors and the odds of you having the same errors are slim. When comparing two products that likely sound exactly the same, the brains invents a difference which too many gladly accept.
There seems to be some acceptance of certain distortions causing potentially pleasant tonal shifts, and obviously tube amplifiers with high output resistance can cause significant frequency changes depending on the speaker. That information is all readily available in the test suites I see run, it seems to be simply a matter of how to interpret that and I see (not so much here) that being done by knowledgeable classically educated people in this field. From audiophiles I simply see declarations of magic and no information at all that is portable to my or someone else's situation.