Not at all. It became popular mainly because as part of the spread of the flat UI epidemic, the previously non-optional “light mode” OS UI themes all shifted away from midtone colors to blinding stark whites. This meant that monitor brightness settings that had previously been comfortable suddenly weren’t.
On top of this, modern flat UI light mode themes consistently have poorer contrast and delineation than their dark mode counterparts, because higher contrast with darker grays makes flat white UI themes appear “dirty”. So even if the brightness isn’t an issue, your eyes have fewer visual cues to guide them.
Aside from that, on IPS panel monitors lowering brightness past a certain point also greatly lowers color vividness which looks bad, which is why some of us like to keep it maybe not maxed but a bit higher than is comfortable with light mode.
Win32 controls ignoring system colors goes much farther back than dark mode being introduced in Windows 10. The theming engine that broke a lot of that functionality was introduced in Windows XP. Beyond that, there were always a few hardcoded colors like disabled gray text going back to Windows 95.
Dark mode ignoring Win32 system colors is not incompetence. It was _intentional_. Dark mode was introduced by the UWP side, which intentionally did not extend it to Win32. To this day, there is not even a Win32 API for desktop apps to query whether dark mode is even enabled. The official recommendation is to compute the luminance of the UWP foreground color setting:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/moder...
Intentional malice, in other words. A stupid attempt at pushing UWP.
>Dark mode is used by 81.9% of 2,500 Android users on their phones, in apps, and in other situations. 9.9% alternate between the light and dark
So it's the other way around. Only a very small minority of users actually care about light mode.
If you're building win32 you're not targeting android.