In my experience the KDE desktop lets you set monitor brightness from the UI... and on Wayland it happens even if you don't ask it to (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=494497). You can turn it off by "setting the `POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1` environment variable in PowerDevil as described in its README file: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/powerdevil/-/blob/master/READM..."