Been using acetone on hands for years, someday I will be a cancer test case over it and xylene/MEK/ carbon tet exposure. That ethanol residue felt different. Death Valley bone dry from desiccated skin? Been there hundreds of times, even to hands splitting open to bleed in like 50 places. The heavier residue most definitely started about the time ethanol was introduced to our fuel here. It varied, sometimes worse and sometimes better. Now that I'm forced to think about it probably quite a bit better now. The skin on hands felt totally different in the two conditions. I washed printing press blankets bare handed for 35 years and never saw the heavy VOC drying agents there do that.
As well, the first year Foci cars went through a big recall where Ford yanked fuel pumps by the thousands for 'fuel additive issues', as close as they would go to blaming fuel makers. I have two of the cars. The earliest one clogged the pump inlet with a certain type of slimy gook that could be that residue in super heavy concentration, think pure white translucent snot by the scads. Whole bottom of the pump module was filled with it. No solvent of any type would touch it, but WATER cut and took it off instantly. Allowed to dry it was sticky. I simply cleaned the pump out after finding that out, reinstalled and pump runs to this day fine. The second car showed what appeared to be same problem years later but this time it was solid red rust deposits to again clog the pump screen, gobs of it. Recleaned again and car back up and running fine. I think the first issue was incomplete filtering (or possible distilling, now that it has come up) of ethanol that then was added to fuel, fuel issues at stations (Walmart/Murphy USA got dragged into it at one point) were showing up on TV news left and right around then. The fuel makers realized the fuel had to be cleaner and then took steps and why the white crap never showed up again. It may well be that the fuel is better quality now, I think so. No issues of late because I worked out how to deal with it anyway.
Maybe it was just early ethanol delivery quality control rather than ethanol production itself, the stuff itself MAY be clean, just keep other crap out of it.
Also, after more reading it seems apparent that distilling once does not guarantee 100% pure ethanol, it must be done more than once (3X suggested) to increase purity and every time you lose some of the ethanol doing it. I can see business procedures as skipping some of that.