Depends on your call; u-law has poor frequency response and reasonable dynamic range. Not great for music, but ok enough for voice, and it's very consistent. 90s calls were almost all circuit switched in the last mile, and multiplexed per sample on digital lines (T1 and up). This means very low latency and zero jitter; there would be a measurable but actually imperceptible delay versus an end to end analog circuit switched call; but digital sampling near the ends means there would be a lot less noise. Circuit switching also means you'd never get dropped samples --- the connection is made or its not, although sometimes only one-way.

Modern calls are typically using 20 ms samples, over packet switched networks, so you're adding sampling delay, and jitter and jitter buffers. The codecs themselves have encode/decode delay, because they're doing more than a ADC/DAC with a logarithm. Most of the codecs are using significantly fewer bits for the samples than u-law, and that's not for free either.

HD Voice (g.722.2 AMR-Wide Band) has a much larger frequency pass band, and sounds much better than GSM or OPUS or most of these other low bandwidth codecs. There's still delay though; even if people will tell you 20-100ms delay is imperceptible, give someone an a/b call with 0 and 20 ms delay and they'll tell you the 0 ms delay call is better.