But this is not how paper works! Paper reflects existing light, and thus automatically matches the general brightness/whitepoint of the ambient illumination. Whereas a monitor is often the brightest thing in your field of view. If laptops with epaper displays ever become a thing, programmers will likely prefer those black-on-white.

If someone earnestly prefers bright backgrounds, I'm not going to say they're wrong. But it feels like much of the "preference" here is due to deprecating dark backgrounds as "weird" plus then pure momentum, and articles like this one don't help.