By trying to outsmart your monitor brightness setting and micromanaging it yourself per-app you're killing the consistency. This should be used for relative color schemes in your app, not for micromanaging the brightness.

Neutral grey makes sense in two cases:

- Relative color schemes in which your elements can be either lighter or darker than the background.

- Precise color grading, because white and black backgrounds shift color perception too much.

If you feel the background is too bright, either add more light in the room, or reduce the monitor brightness. It's all relative, it physically cannot have too much absolute brightness to hurt your eyes. The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. What hurts them is excessive contrast: staring at the monitor in the dark room, pure black color schemes on OLED screens, etc. This looks jarring and breaks eye adaptation.

> The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt.

It turns out bodies don't all respond the same way to the same stimuli. Sunny days cause me real pain. A thin layer of ground fog with bright sun above it is brutal for me, as is bright sun with snow on the ground. I feel so much more comfortable outside on a dark, cloudy day. My eye doctor tells me she frequently hears the same from others. Each of us has a different response curve to light levels.