After 7 years of what? 7 years since someone opened a random issue on a random repo?

From the page you linked: Issue 789719, that’s why.

Perhaps I'm missing something here, or may be an arrogant internet neckbeard, but I'm always confused as to why people are often so eager/excited by dark mode (e.g. Slack around a year ago, or GitHub today)

Isn't the implementation of 'Dark Mode' little more than a CSS Color palette and a toggle switch nested somewhere in user settings?

Are people celebrating the usability over the technical feat?

Seems like much ado about nothing :/

Yes it should be, but seems the reality is many sites and apps hardcode colors and don't have great separation of presentation from color. Many designers and product people have a hard time getting their head around views that might not look the same and to design for the content, not the picture, etc.

Some people are photophobic and some people use dark mode because of migraines. Some people avoid bright screens after a certain hour for various reasons.

And dark mode is often done poorly. If you could just flip the colors, you could use that phone feature that does that to get the same result but you can't. That typically looks like crap and works poorly.

> questionable merits of dark mode in general

I'm confused about what you find questionable about this, are you saying we shouldn't accommodate people with disabilities?

Dark mode, besides looking cool, is sometimes promoted as healthier to the eyes, or using less energy to display the same content. These are the claims I think are questionable. The accessible color features will be cool.

I like dark mode because it looks better, health claims or not.

Finally!

Hopefully it will be based on the prefers-color-scheme media feature, instead of it being a setting to toggle…

Dark mode has big issues with use generated content. you make a logo, diagram, or screenshot for your README, you can't make it dark/light compatible.

So long as the <picture> and <source> tags and the media attribute are whitelisted, you can do this:

  <picture>
    <source src=screenshot-dark.png media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)">
    <img src=screenshot-light.png>
  </picture>

And then if the site is doing dark mode toggling by some means other than `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)`, it can go through and rewrite the media queries in all user-generated content, e.g. to change that one to media="all" in dark mode or media="not all" in light mode.