I always found that reducing brightness to the point where the screen is no longer glaring at me also reduce contrast too much for my comfort. Dark mode, on the other hand, is not glaring at me but still maintaining a high contrast. Yes, at least for coding, this is partly because of my editor theme preferences. Though I think the cognitive effect of brighter-colored elements foregrounding and enlarging themselves against darker colors, and vice versa, also helps.

Back in the early 80s (can't speak to much earlier or later since that is when I was in college) most of the major technical colleges (one of which I was attending) referred to their programming degrees as Software Engineering. Why? Most likely because there were two camps, science and engineering, and you had to be in one or the other. The Computer Science side, which included both hardware and software, was much more abstract and theoretical and, at the time, tended not to produce people doing the actual work. The disappearance of SE degrees in favor of CS degrees and the "developer" moniker came later as programming degrees proliferated. Probably because the other engineering programs derided software engineering as a degree for people who couldn't hack being "real" engineers so both sides felt the need for an amicable divorce. Given what started happening at that time, I'm sure many of those newly minted SE's were crying all the way to the bank a few short years later.