If we're talking about a sunset, then we're talking about your monitor shooting out blinding, eye-hurting brightness light wherever the sun is in the image. That wouldn't be very pleasant.

Linear encoding doesn't change the max brightness of the monitor.

More importantly, the camera isn't recording blinding brightness in the first place! It'll say those pixels are pure white, which is probably a few hundred or thousand nits depending on shutter settings.

That's a matter of tone mapping which is separate from gamma encoding? Even today, linearized pixel value 255 will be displayed at your defined SDR brightness no matter what. Changing your encoding gamma won't help that because for correct output the transform necessarily needs to be be undone during display.

Which is why I'm looking at replacing my car's rear-view mirror with a camera and a monitor. Because I can hard-cap the monitor brightness and curve the brightness below that, eliminating the problem of billion-lumens headlights behind me.