Honestly, I just find this kind of weird. Unless you had a plasma display in 2012 (or a CRT?) you were using an LCD which have a realistic luminance ratio of ~2

Honestly, I just find this kind of weird. Unless you had a plasma display in 2012 (or a CRT?) you were using an LCD which have a realistic luminance ratio of ~200:1. Even the good FFS/IPS panels weren't better and the rest of the luminance range was taken up in the backlight... and unless you're in a blacked out basement you have reflection/scatter off the screen, which is already additive. Most screen gammas are/were roughly square law (sRGB=2.2) above a small linear region below 16 (8bit) so green 0xFF is more than 256x brighter than 0x0F. This has changed with HDR and modern OLED and miniLED backlights that in a perfect environment (not your office) can achieve >1000:1 luminance ratios.