Listen, just completely off topic, but something has been bothering me for a long time. What the hell is going on with the light-gray-on-white formats everywhe

Listen, just completely off topic, but something has been bothering me for a long time. What the hell is going on with the light-gray-on-white formats everywhere? When did this start? And why? Who is responsible for this? Every single book, repeat, EVERY SINGLE BOOK, going back 100s of years, uses black [1] text on white or cream paper. There's no light gray in the world of books. This is a consensus formed by centuries of production and consumption. Now, it's easy for me to go CSS -> Disable Styles -> All Styles, and so get readable text, but the average person is just left to suffer. It's not an isolated problem. It's like every website is doing this lately. What's going on? [1] Really, dark purple.