Disregarding how much of an echo chamber this hobby as far as never knowing where a claim truly originates, I do wonder if part of the reason people associate CCD sensors with "the film look" is not for any specific quality of CCD sensors as a technology but rather because most of the film photos to end up online for a decent while were run through some ancient Nikon/Minolta film negative scanner (with 8-bit color in extreme cases) and their flavor of color science and highlights started to be associated with the film medium itself rather than the scanners.