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.