Your eyes could hurt for a variety of reasons - brightness, too long screen time, being dry for external reasons, etc. Most humans are poor at identifying the cause of one-off events: you may think it's because you turned on a blue-light filter, but it actually could be because you used your phone for an hour less.
That's why we have science to actually isolate variables and prove (or at least gather strong evidence for) things about the world, and why doctors don't (or at least shouldn't) make health-related recommendations based on vibes.
Except they don't. This is evidence about one potential mechanism. Not evidence saying there are no other potential mechanisms.
This is actually a very common mistake in popular science writing, to confuse the two.
There are eight billion of us, we can’t all be different, there must be at least some categories we can’t be sorted in to, maybe those who find woollen clothing itchy and those who don’t, and those who find blue-light reduction more comfortable and those who don’t.
One of my pet theories is that this hyper fixation on The Ultimate Truth via The Scientific Method is what happens when a society mints PhDs at an absurd rate. We went up with a lot of people who learn more and more about less and less, and a set of people who idolise those people and their output.
Sometimes the causality is clear enough that you don't need sophisticated science to figure it out. Did you know that the only randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of parachutes at preventing injury and death when jumping out of an airplane found that there is no effect? Given that, do you believe there really is no effect?
You are going to HATE to find out about night-mode in the browser
If you just like how something looks, that's fine, but there's a difference between "I like how X looks" (subjective opinion) than "X helps me sleep better" (difficult to prove but objectively true or false).
Edit: Changed this in my original message as it seems multiple people got confused by my prior poor wording.
Not invalid; suspicious.
If I put your hand in a vice and do the vice up to the point where you start saying you can feel the pressure…
Yes, of course I’m going to be suspicious.
Gaslighting doesn’t exist, you made that up because you’re fucking crazy.
/s
Surely you didn't actually believe that unless you JUST landed here from space after being away for 60 years.