I have been wanting to explore this matter further, as it seemed to deal with the issues of overbearing whites and harsh contrast on macOS which seem to affect others here as well. It looks like @brvideo has not been around in some time, but I would love to analyze his SwitchResX preferences files and the terminal history in ~/.zsh_history
(from the time he got it working) to see if they would give us any leads.
Speculating about what the Displays preference pane would theoretically touch (when the inadvertent reset occurred), the following items came to mind: resolution, refresh rate, arrangement, color depth, color profile, and possibly HDR-related settings. Notably, the setting appeared to have a visual effect early in the boot process, suggesting that the setting was persistent in NVRAM. Noting a few interesting facts about the good settings in the story, 1) they appeared to require a reboot to go into effect, and 2) they were persistent through updates (until the interaction with the display settings), although it was not clear whether these were minor updates or if they included major macOS version upgrades.
Do any further ideas come to mind? To me, this sounds like a color profile or backlight setting issue (rather than something like dithering), or (less likely) related to the refresh rate. I have noticed that on several of my Macs, during the boot process the Apple logo will shift brightness a few times (some of which are more comfortable than others), so I wonder if he had previously managed to disable some part of the display initialization.
thorpee This would work for a little bit after a fresh install of of Big Sur. I did however notice after I installed and opened some apps it would cause eye issues across the whole OS and I would have to wipe the whole mac and do the steps above again to get it right. I made mental notes of which apps did this and not to use them.
This is quite interesting, counter-intuitive as it sounds. My problems began with a 2021 MacBook Pro 14-inch mini-LED XDR, but interestingly, when I got rid of it and used the Migration Assistant application to move my data back to my (previously safe) Intel Mac hardware, the strain seemed to follow albeit to a lesser extent. When I happened to boot another disk with a clean Monterey installation on that same computer, it looked "calmer" than my main Monterey environment, making me wonder if some strain-inducing setting(s) were migrated back with my data (although plausibly, my condition could just be deteriorating).