> Show me a non-LED that can do that.

Many of use simply don't find LED lights, no matter the color they try to simulate, enjoyable.

I find my LED lights, including fancy decorative ones, bearable only because I always use one real, old-school, warm white (more like yellow really), incandescent (hence non-LED) light in my living room. And, yup, if you know what you're looking for, it's totally possible to still buy incandescent lightbulbs.

LED lights, no matter the shade/color always give such a fake / non-cosy feeling to just about everything.

I'm taking an actual candle + an incandescent lightbulb's warmth feeling any day over anything LED.

Now as I'm also conscious about saving the planet, I'll mix those with mostly LED lights. But having one incandescent lightbulb (and/or one candle) really creates, to many of us, a better atmosphere than pure LED lighting.

It's the old "you're eyes cannot detect more than 24 fps" all over again: "you cannot detect the flickering of a LED light". Except I can instantly tell if it's the cold (no matter how "warm white" the box says it is) light of a LED or the actual warm light of a proper incandescent lightbulb.

Have you tried Philips Ultra Definition bulbs? They have 1/6th the flicker percentage of incandescent bulbs and 1/3 the flicker index.

Here's a review I found of several bulbs for CRI, flicker, dimming performance, and spectral characteristics [1].

[1] https://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/25-soft-white-led-light-b...

There's two separate issues where LEDs still have a hard time competing with incandescent bulbs: CRI (really R9 or other deep-red measures, because CRI stats are sort of gamed) and flicker. Most LED bulbs also have poor heatsinks and are more likely to die if kept inverted or in enclosed fixtures.

All of these are individually solved problems, you just can't buy a bulb that's an e26 retrofit that satisfies all of them for whatever reason. If LED bulbs actually lasted 10 years, then there'd be 10 year warranties. Yet even the most expensive boutique LEDs (e.g. from YujiLED) are only 3 years at best.

For the vast majority of people the problem was their first exposure to LED bulbs were in harsh temperatures and they wrote them off. The lightbulb wars aren't new. It's an evergreen political football.

If you strongly prefer incandescent that's fine but it doesn't take the 5-7 years the author suggests to recoup your investment. It might, or it might not. Where your curve lands depends, but they do in fact use a lot less energy.