I've found that while I may need to recalibrate with my Spyder, color accuracy is essentially unchanged at 50% brightness.
By which I mean: bright colors won't be anywhere as bright with a dim display as they would be when the brightness is turned up. And the difference between dark and light colors is more pronounced with a higher brightness level.
Also burn-in might not be such a big deal for developers (a category that Apple more or less ignores).
Not all content is too bright and white. Videos for example playing at full screen, I would not want reduced brightness for. It's the bright 100% white background of websites on a large monitor that is not comfortable.
Also most monitors have annoying UX for adjusting brightness, requiring two presses of tiny unmarked buttons to get to menu then change brightness.
I was very pleased when Youtube added their nightmode feature, which I leave on always.
This is sloppy but I believe correct. Any experts, feel free to correct or extend this, thanks.
When I stated using a mac, the bright background infuriated me, but when I went back to a dark background, I realised the mac was just nicer to use.
To the guy saying it's a strain to use black text on white, I believe some eye disorders make it easier to read white text on black. Another reason is the brightness of the monitor is just excessive - try turning it down.
HTH
Take the new macOS dark mode. Looked great when I first switched to it, but after a few hours I happily switched back to light mode.
I also only really read/code at day/in well-lit environments, so dark mode doesn't really do anything for me when it comes to eye strain etc.
There's an IT 'dungeon' at my workplace, and all of their screens are in a dark mode theme although the IT people there do not use any lights in that room besides the glow of their monitors, and maybe 10 feet of multicolored string lights in one of the corners so you aren't running into desks. They even have blackout curtains over the windows. The first time I walked into that room trying to find someone, I assumed it was empty, lights off, and everyone went home, but there were a dozen people in there working like that! I'd feel like I crawled out of a cave every time I left the room if I worked in that environment. Good lighting keeps me awake as well.
You basically said it yourself. It takes a lot of effort to make everything dark. Instead I make bright comfortable. Around 5% brightness on the external monitor and f.lux active all the time with a pleasant middle setting.
bright text on a dark background (at least on a display) triggers auras and nausea for me. the auras can vary a bit, but a typical one would be seeing an overlay of flickering, scrolling dark-colored horizontal bars for the next few minutes
i actually came to this thread to see if the extension supported "Light mode for everything" as an option :)
You can turn up monitor brightness to compensate, but you could have turned down monitor brightness to compensate for the light theme anyway.
Also, if you're using a projector, dark modes tend to be noticably more difficult to read. I'm not sure why that is.
Honestly, though, I stick with Microsoft's dark mode 95% of the time.
Because if the background is uniformly bright (white/whitish) I can use the accessibility options to invert the display and make everything dark :-)
I hate Windows 10 full black taskbar (must be #000000), because it breaks this. And even W10 lets you pick some colors in a theme, you can't go full white (#ffffff).
I work from home so there are less distractions and it helps me stay focused for this... but all in all I think this is 100% pure preference, I cannot work in dark lit rooms, when I am working at 3am (this is rare but happens) I have my hospital grade lighting (my wifes words) blasting at on :-)
in other news, I think its relevant for me to say my HN topcolor is ffffff :-)
In light environments, dark UIs get washed out and are illegible.