Millennial here, I welcome anything to break up the current design aesthetics. I never liked material design and designs from Apple and Google both look tired.
I did dark modes before it was cool, but now that I'm getting older, I want some kind of grey mode. Something that doesn't feel like I'm looking down the barrel of a flashlight nor something that's gonna cause eyestrain.
As for all the flashy doodads and movement. That's more designing for psychology than aesthetics. Movement looks exciting, and has been used successfully for years in other mediums.
I was wondering how long it would take before I saw someone advocating for webpage backgrounds to be grey again. Mosaic (and later Netscape) had the right idea from the start. It's only too bad it's taken so long for us to get back to where we started.
I want web page backgrounds to respect the defaults I set in the browser. Remember those settings? They are still in your browser but the first thing a web designer does nowadays is force background and font colors, text sizes, and so on, totally disregarding the user’s set preferences.
You can force a font and minimum font size at least in Firefox or set a default zoom level. One trick for anyone trying this is that English can be under Latin or Other and Firefox only allows this setting per writing system not overall (possibly some or all others can also be under two options similarly). Setting minimum font size does break some things (text in SVG diagrams being unreadable is the most common one I see) but I don't see how anyone can manage with the tiny fonts websites use. Zoom is less likely to break things I think but I don't like that it scales images.
I just checked and in Firefox you can also force text, background, and link colors. I imagine that breaks some things also.
Lots of websites load css from their CDN that is usually a CNAME, so a consolation prize of using uBlock Origin in advanced mode with CNAME decloaking and blocking third party sites by default is that text is often more readable (once you get to it, there is usually a bunch of extra random junk and only sometimes a "skip to content" link).
If light mode is too bright, it means your screen is too bright. It should be easy to fix.
I suspect GP may have astigmatism. A girlfriend of mine had it and constantly would complain about my devices being in dark mode whenever she had to use them. She eventually showed me an article on how it does actually make text harder to focus on for them.
I did dark modes before it was cool, but now that I'm getting older, I want some kind of grey mode. Something that doesn't feel like I'm looking down the barrel of a flashlight nor something that's gonna cause eyestrain.
As for all the flashy doodads and movement. That's more designing for psychology than aesthetics. Movement looks exciting, and has been used successfully for years in other mediums.