And a curse long after frame modes lost any real world purpose. The workflows ended surviving much longer than the technology that justified them.
We kept that same gamma when we switched to digital color spaces (and MPEG compression) - it's why noiry dark movies (think of Blade Runner with people in dark spaces smoking) - because of gamma correction there are few digital codes available at the dark corner of the digital color cubes and the result tends to be blocky simply because the color space simply can't represent those colors .... all because of a technical choice made in the late 30s to reduce the cost of Tvs