You’re leaving out the part where the sodium lights wasted a lot of their lumens by tossing them into the sky. LEDs can be dimmer because they can be directionally controlled.

That's trivially solved with a reflective housing, which nearly all sodium lamps I've ever seen had.

While it is definitely true that original power drops were due to lower lumens, few things:

- reflective housing is super inefficient (~70% losses on the bounced light off typical material, at the top end expensive stuff still ~23%), still better than just losing the light upwards but not as many lumens on the road as a lab test would show

- Today LEDs are more efficient than sodium

Some math: 100W HPS cobra head lamp prdouces 9.5k lumens, including ballast it draws ~133W from the wall. Lab test shows about 70% of the lamp's light leaves the fixture (with the rest being lost in the housing) leading to ~7k lumens exiting. Roughly 53 lm/W.

LED cobra head lamps get like ~125 lm/W on the low end + fade much more slowly than sodium

Don't low-pressure sodium lamps get like >2x efficiency gains over HPS?

They do.

People don't like them mostly because they're orange.

Astronomers definitely do like them because they're orange, and they can filter it out of their photos.

Why there weren't dimmer low pressure sodium lights?