> It first materialized in a big way back during the late seasons of Game of Thrones. Episode after episode, people furiously tweeted about how hard it was to see, well, anything going on on screen.

From an enthusiastic GoT fan back then: I don't really know where the author got that "episode after episode" from. I remember exactly one episode, where overdark scenes were an issue, S8E3 "The Long Night" - and in the episode, darkness was a plot device and a deliberate stylistic choice.

There was an unfortunate scene in which the characters were unable to make out whether the enemy was approaching or not, due to intense darkness. The filmmakers chose to visualise this by making the scene almost pitch black, with literally not enough information in the pixels to see the characters. I'm sure that must have looked impressive in a test screening in a cinema, but when streamed, it caused lots of viewers to be distracted by their own reflections and turn up their TVs to maximum brightness - because the scene sort of looked as if you should be able to see something, even though really you weren't.

I think that was a visual experiment by the filmmakers which, frankly, failed - but it was at least a deliberate choice and not blindly following some trend.