I agree. In my case, my art teacher told us, almost 20y ago now, that we shouldn’t use pure black in digital design because it‘s unnatural. He failed to explain why though, and I never found an argument that didn’t sound dogmatic, so I‘ve filed it under cargo cult.
20 years ago, pure black on a CRT, for example, up against pure white would have generated artifacts on many displays.
Similar things happened with TV programs. NTSC has low color resolution and much higher luma resolution. Large shifts around the color wheel, at higher resolutions, smaller pixel sizes, generated undesirable artifacts.
Luma changes generally didn't.
This kind of thing drove art direction toward more broad swaths of color, luma and gentle hue changes to imply texture and detail, rather than actually forcing detail.
Frankly, these subtle limits in display tech are all over the place.
4k HDMI does not have 4k pixel perfect color, or didn't last time I looked.
Discussing art in these contexts makes great sense!
For that matter, one might also say to avoid high saturation colors... many displays cannot even render them. CRT displays can, plasma TV can, and some new OLED apparently can.
LCD, generally can't.
Nature does present these colors to us, so... yeah.
I much prefer to talk about these things in terms of display capability, potential artifacts and such myself. It is a far more useful discussion.
