Why I'm interested in win7 is that if it really, truly is something you can use without eye strain, then I might go trough the trouble of installing win7 myself. But since your situation seems similar to mine, but with the difference that my situation suddenly worsened to be similar to yours 2 months ago and I do not have any display device, except Kindle and Mira that do not cause eye strain, I am really doubtful that an os type or version could make a difference.
I have now confirmed that eye patching helps, if not completely mitigates the problem. E.g., Yesterday I was warching TV with the kids for 1 hour. My eyes became red, dry and irritated. The sam TV that has been problem free for 7 years.
When the kids went to sleep, I put tape on my right eye glass and we watched Netflix for some 3 hours without any eye strain.
Now I'm writing this with also only left eye.
I tested the same during last week at work.
Now this cannot be the solution, as I cannot meet customers with tape on my right eye.
If there could be a doctor who could think outside the box and could really investigate, why my stereo vision got messed up 2 moths ago and does not seem to heal. Maybe I could get a diagnosis to this and get prescribed glasses with the other eye blocked, so I could get by those days at work where I need to be onsite at the customer.
I can deal with the occasional teams video calls where I need to have my video on, without patching. And for those occasions where I really have a long teams video session and my eyes get bloodshot, maybe I could have those pupil dilating eye drops to rest my eyes for the evening. The effect of those drops was really amazing. For the first time in weeks my eyes were not stinging and bloodshot, instead clear like the eyes of children.
But sorry @ensete for saying this, but anfter struggling with this for 30 years and now having the situation that not even PWM free screens are tolerable anymore, I have my doubts, can you REALLY use your win7 machine for, say 10h workday for a week, without any problems. I say this because I really doubt that there could be so many individual differences to this condition. I had 7 display devices that had been ok for 1-12 years, which basically turned not OK over night and there is zero hope I can use them ever again.