Ah you are one of those people who believe nobody in the whole world has worse eyesight or screen or lighting conditions than what you presently have.
Nope. And not sure how you made the leap there from me giving context into my environment and equipment and how I was perceiving some text on the screen.
I perceive it as "light grey", so shrug.
It's all "readable" in the sense of "I can read it", but not in the sense of "I can read it effortlessly". I have a bit of CSS in Stylus to fix it, and it takes noticeably less effort to read it with a "normal" font. The RabbitMQ menu is just so much easier to scan as well with a more normal colour.
Good distinction between light grey setting and perception (I was speaking to the former). Maybe on your screen/OS/browser for a given font, a setting of #000 would start at (perceived) “grey”.
And agreed that readability is a scale and it’s best to be on the “easy” end of that scale.
Font weight is a crucial factor of readability, and it depends on screen specifics. On my 2020 M1 mbp at ~40% screen brightness, the NNGroup link quote is quite readable. As it is on my phone.
I don't rate any designer or developer very highly if they're too precious about their "art".
The HN dead/downvoted comments is contentious for sure. I don't agree with the choice fwiw.