I think this probably concerns many more people than are aware of it. I could live with the flickering but I live better by doing what OP did, set screen brightness to max, on all of my laptops and external LCD screens. I then use redshift (I'm on Linux)[1] to dim the screen to the desired brightness, i.e. absorb the excess light in the liquid crystal layer. Sadly this does appear to lead to some loss in brilliance and color quality, but it's not too bad, and I like that I never have to see the flickering.

I know someone who puts a foil based filter in front of the screen, that may work somewhat better, I still haven't tried that myself.

I find it frustrating how almost all LED lighting installed in the UK is PWM based (if dimmed), or otherwise flickering (AC), too. And it's just a question of consumer expectation: if you buy an LED light bulb in a standard shop in Switzerland, it doesn't flicker, if you buy one in the UK, it does. Both bulbs use the new LED filaments, you can't tell the difference from looking at the bulbs, the difference is in how the power supply in the base of the bulb works. I opened up one of the Swiss bulbs and it had a proper switched-mode power supply (using a switching frequency probably in the 100 KHz range); I saw a video on Youtube by someone who opened up one of the UK ones, and the power supply was based on current limiting via capacitors (and then a rectifier), which leads to a flicker at twice the AC frequency (hence 100 Hz). There's going to be a cost difference of £1 or so, the Swiss consumers are apparently ready to pay for that, the UK population not (or the UK shops possibly pocket the savings).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift_(software) (actually still using the command-line variant of an older version, e.g. "redshift -b 1 -g 0.9:0.9:0.9 -l $POS -t 5500:4800")