> block the entire page, really? talk about burning down the village to save it

I'm curious for what the other approach is. Users find it annoying to refresh the page and have their dark-mode setting change, or have their dark-mode setting change while navigating the site.

So I have to block paint until I can query local storage in order to avoid flashing, what's the alternative? Below someone suggested using cookies and only serving CSS that does the desired styling, which I guess is doable but requires a non-trivial infrastructural change.