Comment by Spivak

It took the better part of a decade to get close to the light quality that incandescent bulbs produced, and we're still not really 1:1.

For alot of things, that's fine, but I distinctly remember having to bring clothing over to a window because the bulbs I had would not render the color of it accurately enough to put an outfit together. That's partly the clothing manufacturer's fault for using cheap dyes that are prone to metameric failure, but still, annoying.

I'm still in the process of purging the early gen LED bulbs that I have with nicer, high CRI, High Ra, variants, and getting dimmable bulbs in the places where it matters, because around me, the incandescent rollout was more of a rugpull when LED's first came out, and I snagged a couple bulk cases of cheap LED bulbs to use that were... not great.

I do keep a few decorative 'eddison' bulbs, aka squirrel cage bulbs, for reading use, as they are very warm, like 2300k, and the light they produce is very comfortable to be in at night. They use a ton of power, but, because they're not running their filaments as hard as they could, they tend to last forever. I've had one go out in ~10 years because I had removed it for cleaning and dropped it while it was hot (and also because it was hot), the envelope survived but upon being turned back on it ran for about a second before failure.

All of that to say, yes, there were downsides, mostly short/mid term downsides, some that persist to this day if you're not clever or don't know what to care about.

You might be forgetting the decade of crappy compact fluorescent bulbs before reasonably-priced decent-quality LED bulbs became viable. Crappy, in that I don't think I ever owned one that lasted anywhere near their supposed 10-year life. And the long warm-up time for at least some models, but you didn't know which ones. And how to dispose of them properly. And the concerns with mercury when you broke one.

The "wasteful" infrared light turns out to have important health benefits. The same health benefits can be got from sunlight, but when indoor light was incandescent, people who couldn't get sunlight because they had to work all day would get at least some infrared from indoors lighting.

When my parents did a remodel in the '00s they wanted can lighting. They had to use a new, specific type of receptacle because of efficiency standards.

But since then we've found a better way using the old receptacles, which wasn't an option in the '00s. They don't really make those bespoke ones anymore. When my mom did a refresh to sell her house last year, she had to replace everything done in the '00s.

Can't use them as heaters anymore?

This last winter I was asked whether I knew if Tractor Supply still carried 100W bulbs since the person used them to keep a pipe in a barn from freezing and the current one had burnt out. The closest thing I could think of (that was easy to find) was a 275W heat lamp, but that uses a lot more power.

Flicker and color temperature. They also used to be expensive for renters who wouldn't see out their lifetimes.

Flicker