Disturbing, eye-unfriendly light/dark contrasts in menus and icons

Lol.

Literally no one in UX design proscribes putting full-white text on hard-black background.

Look at the style of ‘dark mode’ on most user interfaces, like mac os. The background is a dark grey and the text is a light grey. Even back on DOS days with a black background text was still a light grey rather than full white.