Of course offices, factories and even schools still use artificial lighting even during daylight hours. And now the energy use of artificial lighting is much lower than back when everything used filament.
A while ago Turkey switched to a different timezone and stopped doing DST for reasons and now everyone was waking up one hour early in winters. Considering how bad traffic is in larger cities that meant a lot of people will be waking up and going to work or school while it is still dark.
There was a survey in parts of the EU a few years ago about abolishing DST that came out largely in favor of abolishing it. In Germany one major source of debate around the issue was that the survey referred to the timezones as "winter time" and "summer time" and predictably more people said they would prefer permanent "summer time". An equivalent survey referring to the timezones as "standard time" and "daylight savings time" likely would have had the opposite result. I could imagine that Turkey picked EEST instead of EET for similar reasons.
Having had a job for six months over the winter where I spent the majority of the 8 hour work day underground, which at times meant I'd go for days without seeing proper sunlight, I agree that this is just miserable.
The key factor in the war was the blackout - street lighting was turned off for the duration and vehicle headlights were mostly covered over, to avoid providing easy targets for night bombing raids. This obviously hugely increased the hazards posed by the early sunsets under GMT.
https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/uk