Part of the reason for asking in the first place is because I'm quite sensitive to the light quality as produced by an incandescent bulb, preferring it vastly over even the most 'modern' 'energy saver' bulbs.
Anyhow, I agree about incandescent bulbs being nice. I never found a CFL I was happy with. The Philips LED bulbs are very good though: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-Bayonet-Light-Bulb-Frosted/...
They don't flicker (and I'm someone infuriated by PWM'd lights on modern cars). They achieve full brightness instantly. The colour temperature and spectral rendering index is good. They are much more reliable than some similar unbranded bulbs I've seen (about 15 such bulbs were installed in my kitchen area at work. They fail at a rate of about one per month, in a manor consistent with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Pemtc3Uhw).
They do cost £9 for two though. They'll need to run for about 500 hours to pay for themselves (vs incandescent). I reckon the first one I bought has run for about 2500 hours by now.
Nowadays Philips seem to be selling both a higher quality and a lower quality bulb in each wattage.
To me the purchase price isn't an issue. I have a few places where I run bulbs 15 or 20 hrs a day. So moving from 60 W to 10 W in those locations made an incredible cost savings. Where I am in the USA, a 1 W load on continuously costs $1/yr. So saving 50 W in a location that's on about 80% of the time saves me $40/yr in electricity. For just one bulb.
Or you could run a heat pump, that wins about a factor of 5.
I learned this from this excellent resource: https://www.withouthotair.com/
There's an argument that