Aside from being easier on the eyes (especially an amber or red interface), they force UI designers to make careful choices, and potentially result in a cleaner, more useable interface.
It's not a project for me yet, just a series of notes and concepts, but I'd like to turn it into a proof of concept at the very least.
Though I dislike the recent low-contrast efforts. Keep high contrast, reduce brightness as desired for your environment.
Having said that, it's hard to beat black on white for contrast ;-) However, I think one of the reasons people like the monochromatic themes (especially white on black) is the same -- they want high contrast with low brightness. By having the background black, they guarantee a low brightness. And when white is too bright, they go for amber.
I find that by doing the reverse (black on white) and setting my brightness very low (I often go as low at 7%, but more normally 11% back light) I have a very comfortable display with a lot more options. It's really funny, though, because when I have to run software that doesn't follow my colour themes, the computer almost looks like it's turned off. If I'm playing a game, I have to crank up the brightness to 70% or 80% in the same lighting conditions.
On a modern screen, a value of 100% is 1000 nits, 0% is far below 1 nits.
On an average shitty monitor, it's more a range 10 times more limited.
Your suggestion of making my monitor emulate your shitty monitor in hardware settings would also make it impossible to use it for use cases that do need this high contrast.
Reading text, on the other hand, gets very painful with that much contrast.
Real text, on a real newspaper, in normal room light, is #454545 text on #f0f0f0 background, in sRGB color space. Not #000 on #fff in sRGB, and definitely not 0 on max on ten times more contrast.
The real issue is that we have no color and contrast management at all for websites. I can't say that a color is meant to mean a certain brightness in nits, so it renders as #777 on my screen, and #000 on yours.
Low-contrast UIs can work well in a typical office environment on bright screens.
Take your ideally calibrated monitor, and use it as a second screen while watching a movie in your darkened home theater. Now take it and use it outside on a sunny day.
I prefer to adjust the brightness. YMMV.
Your description of sRGB is incorrect. sRGB was specified for CRT screens in 1996, used in an ideal viewing environment that is very dimly lit ("The current proposal assumes an encoding ambient luminance level of 64 lux which is more representative of a dim room in viewing computer generated imagery... While we believe that the typical office or home viewing environment actually has an ambient luminance level around 200 lux, we found it impractical to attempt to account for the resulting large levels of flare that resulted" https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB.html)
That doesn't match my viewing environments, which include the range above.
