Ceiling downlights can me (for most people and most purposes) quite nice, but they need to actually be spotlights. If you have a light that is close to being a point source (very bright per unit solid angle), which includes most lights aimed at people, you want that light to avoid emitting light at an angle that you're likely to be able to see. So a downlight on a ceiling should emit very little light past an angle of, say, 45 degrees or even less from vertical. After all, for most purposes (but not bedrooms when in bed!), you are not looking straight up, and a light that's shining on the top of your head or even on the tops of your eyebrows is not irritating your eyes. But a bright light, shining at you, that's in your field of view when looking horizontally, can be extremely annoying.
The office-style solution is big diffuse ceiling lights. The easy but rather inefficient solution is indirect lighting. The expensive solution is to use high-end architectural lights that have a trim or lens design that makes the light source almost invisible from shallow angles. An excellent and cheap solution is to use highly recessed lights with standard, inexpensive designs. A PAR30S lamp in an ordinary (not "shallow") 5" or 6" ceiling can, with a trim that allows it to be installed at a respectable recess, can work very nicely. (That "S" is important. The whole point is that it's a "short neck" light, so the bottom surface is farther above the ceiling. And the PAR part is important, too -- PARs are reflectors, not floods, and they emit over a narrower angle.)
As far as I can tell, this is almost completely ignored for residential and small business lighting, especially with LED lights from places like Costco and Home Depot. You do not want a bright light that emits over 180 degrees installed in plane with your ceiling.
The office-style solution is big diffuse ceiling lights. The easy but rather inefficient solution is indirect lighting. The expensive solution is to use high-end architectural lights that have a trim or lens design that makes the light source almost invisible from shallow angles. An excellent and cheap solution is to use highly recessed lights with standard, inexpensive designs. A PAR30S lamp in an ordinary (not "shallow") 5" or 6" ceiling can, with a trim that allows it to be installed at a respectable recess, can work very nicely. (That "S" is important. The whole point is that it's a "short neck" light, so the bottom surface is farther above the ceiling. And the PAR part is important, too -- PARs are reflectors, not floods, and they emit over a narrower angle.)
Here's a decent article about it:
https://www.agcled.com/blog/glare-and-ugr.html
As far as I can tell, this is almost completely ignored for residential and small business lighting, especially with LED lights from places like Costco and Home Depot. You do not want a bright light that emits over 180 degrees installed in plane with your ceiling.