But I also believe that the UI experience should lean towards uniformity. Still, if you're an expert user of specific software perhaps your brain already manages the context switch. At least, though, maybe the WM could become context aware like Android's dark mode.
Unfortunately too many people misunderstood this and started making apps where everything is dark. A word processor shouldn't have its page white-on-black. A news reader shouldn't display its contents on white-on-black.
I’m young with (I believe) very good eyesight and I physically can’t handle white-on-black styles, especially with text. And I mean #000 and 240-255. It literally burns and blurs my eyes. A dark gray paired with a light gray or off-white is much more pleasing and readable to me.
I won’t discount those styles for text though, because at night it can help my eyes not melt out of my skull compared to black-on-white pages. And I have at times used Google Drive dark CSS themes while doc writing for extended late night sessions, and enabled some for GitLab and GitHub.
As someone who has spent considerable time in CG DCCs (Digital Content Creation), I can confirm that dark themes are a godsend and help immensely (for me) on focusing on the content. It also has the added benefit of not “tainting” your color perception when working with imagery. Blackmagic Design was under fire for a bit because they revamped themes in Resolve and Fusion from a neutral gray to a subtly hinted blue-gray and it threw off color artists as it influenced their grading.
Well, I don't like Windows classic style very much, but I use KDE with Breeze and it is the widget style I prefer amoung anything I have seen, with macOS just a bit under but I haven't used it very much. It is a big contrast with Oxygen in KDE 4, which is the widespread theme I liked the less.
Breeze is just clean, simple, elegant. It bears its name well.
I also tend to use Breeze in Gnome 3 when I periodically try it (Gnome is so beautiful with Breeze!), though Adwaita got a lot better recently, to the point it went from "I dislike this theme, why is it the default?" to "Pretty cool theme!". I might stick with it next time I try Gnome. Same for Tango, though I still prefer Breeze, maybe out of habit.
> recently used a recent copy of photoshop and premiere and the black UI and the widgets being different from the UI of the whole system really bugged me off
Same thing for Blender and Open Shot. Isn't it to help focus on the content?