| I grew up on green CGA, goldenrod Hercules monitors and grayscale mono VGA ones. Indeed, for the past decade I also prefer the light themes, though I find these dark themes pretty usable too:
https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures As I've noticed, the main problem with dark themes is the low contrast usually.
These modus themes were designed scientifically, to meet the contrast ratios recommended by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Also, back in those days mono-monitor days, people just kept the brightness at the same level they used during the day and complained how tiring is it for their eyes to "use the computer for so many hours". My eyes never got tired, because I was constantly adjusting the brightness to match the ambient lighting and I've drastically lowered it, when I was coding in dark. I've noticed that dark-theme users (eg during live streaming) crank up their brightness/contrast to compensate for the low-contrast dark themes, then they are surprised to be blinded when they open a webpage, which is extremely likely to be light themed and they keep complaining about light themes... |
On the whole, this actually allows you to achieve the same contrast level with lower total light emission. If you are in fact clinically light sensitive and you also have difficulty with low contrast, you just can't achieve the balance of contrast you need as effectively with light themes.
> then they are surprised to be blinded when they open a webpage, which is extremely likely to be light themed
For me it's well worth it to sacrifice the 'artistic integrity' of web designers' intentions and use something like Dark Reader or Midnight Lizard to force a dark theme across the whole web.