[lxdlam]

Tried a lot of Monokai-likes or named themes, then picked Monokai Pro and purchased it 4 years ago, and only realized it is the real successor of the original Monokai today.

It's the only color scheme I've used for over 8 years if considering the usage of orig Monokai. For me, it's worth more than its price.

[monokai_nl]

A lot of people think that Monokai Pro is just one of the countless remixes of Monokai. In a sense that's true, but they're often surprised I've also created the original Monokai. I see Monokai Pro as the better balanced and feature-enhanced version of the original.

[vintagedave]

The only other scheme I like is Catppuccin (I use Catpuccin Frappé in dark mode, as it's the lightest of the dark variants.) A colleague recommended it and I was a quick convert.

See https://github.com/catppuccin/catppuccin or https://catppuccin.com/ . I wish they included screenshots, it's really hard to say 'check out this theme' without being able to link one. And I can't screenshot the code I have available in VSCode ;)

[tmtvl]

For screenshots you could just link to one of the implementations, those give at least some indication of what the themes look like. For example: https://github.com/catppuccin/emacs

I suppose it looks decent, but I'm not fond of themes which make comments hard to read.