[IIsi50MHz]

Colour me confused.

Dark mode on an oled reduces brightness (and power consumption).

Dark mode on my work laptop (not oled) reduces backlight brightness. This is auto-tragical, because it seems to only respond to changes in the display buffer's average requested luminance, instead of using an ambient light sensor. Dropping backlight toward minimum when the room is bright makes the screen mostly unreadable. And there's no control for this. Dell should be ashamed!

More importantly, if you place any darkening filter, including a darkened set of pixels, in front of a light source, it reduces the brightness. But perhaps the main concern you intended is "power consumption", not "emitted lux"? If, I'd say "Depends on your application.".

[itmitica]

Dark modes alone only reduce lightness, are not reducing brightness.

That's the distinction some are missing.

And the most important parts:

- no dark mode is actually needed, for me anyway, once I reduce brightness;

- I have serious retina artifacts issues after reading a dark mode web page like that one.