It’s true that many designers tend to look at text more like a texture. Instead of making it large and distinct they will make it small and light colored when it's in fact the only valuable thing on the screen.

It's an unfortunate consequence of so much design today going minimal and more typographic, which makes it's hard to differentiate elements any other way than to start evening out the contrast. If everything that is text was just black you would loose the hierarchy.

There er of course plenty of ways to get around it and most experienced designers know how to deal with it. I don't think it's going to be a lasting problem though.

Also important to notice that retina screens make a big difference between what is readable and not. You can get away with much more finesse when you design for retina screens. And I think a lot of designers unfortunately use only that when they design.

If you look at print typography you will find a lot of small text sizes because print is crisp enough to be readable. So technology will take care of most of it IMO.