bitslacker Thanks for creating that website. I hope more people will use it and add their opinions. I left a comment there the other day about my own personal experience with the Huawei P20.
I've been stuck with Lenovo ZUK Z2 for the last 4 years or so due to this problem with terrible eyestrain. It's an aging phone that uses very slow eMMC storage, and in combination a lack of support for file-based encryption, the write speeds of the storage are awful and it frequently causes the phone to lag for several seconds at a time and crash during any file transfers and downloads.
In the last several months I bought 4 phones from eBay with the hope of finally upgrading - HTC U11, Huawei P20, Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro, Nokia 8 but none of them were able to suit my eyes for varying reasons, and thus I have reverted back to the Lenovo each time with more and more frustration. (Xiaomi was the best of the bunch, but at 6.5" and 190g the phone is far too oversized and weighty to use with one hand)
I am now considering LG G7 - but I see NotebookCheck tested this phone and it has 1,174Hz PWM at 42% brightness and below. The average maximum brightness of the screen is an enormous 970 nits, so 42% of that is 493 nits - far too bright to use indoors without PWM. And since almost the entirety of my usage is indoors in darkly-lit rooms at lower brightness levels, this worries me quite a lot. But then I see the 'peaks' in the modulation graph are are quite shallow, so maybe this is why the screen is less straining for the eyes?
But I am really fed up of all of this, as someone who has always been enthusiastic about technology and gadgets, it's so upsetting that I'm stuck using a painfully slow phone that released 5 YEARS ago because I can't find anything better that doesn't hurt my eyes. I can look at my laptop screen all day long and I don't get the slightest hint of eyestrain. Yet looking at one of these modern phones for just a few minutes is enough to make my eyes suffer! It's ridiculous.