FirmWords

Who must now run around and laboriously (and often erroneously) overhaul their applications when the environment changes.

No, it isn't. You need to go back and look at the history of modern computers, especially personal ones. The standard color scheme was light text on a dark background. Many used white text on a dark-blue background, because it was deemed the most legible. Even after Windows dominated, Word had a checkbox in its settings labeled simply, "Blue background, white text." That setting existed well into the 2000s, and it may still be buried somewhere. Edit: Looks like it was finally removed sometime around 2016; here's one of several posts I found complaining about its removal: https://eileenslounge.com/viewtopic.php?t=36503

Computer makers and users referred to black text on a white background as inverse video. The Atari 8-bits even had a key to toggle between normal and inverse characters when typing (the Atari-logo key). It's even described in the manual: https://www.atarimania.com/documents/atari-800-computer-owne... To quote the manual: "Inverse video is text being shown in dark letters against a light background."

Then came the "desktop publishing" craze and some attempts to make video screens an analogy for a piece of paper. This fails because paper does not EMIT light. Nor is reading black text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day a good way to work. Useful for previewing printed output? OK. For all work on a computer? Not so much.

And yet, perhaps in an effort to be "different" from character-based systems, GUIs migrated to inverse color schemes as their default (except for Apple's, which was always inverse and offered no color-scheme management... and still doesn't). Throughout all of this and into the current day, applications that focus on art, photography, and video & visual effects have implemented a so-called "dark" UI. That's not coincidence.