I think that the LED lighting already caused the population vision to degenerate, because it causing people to prefer brighter lighting than usual and to not seeing good with lighting that was once enough.
In the past, street lighting with <125W MV lamps was enough for safety and now it is too weak.
I can see this phenomenon at the entrance of Carmel hospital, where when I turning off part of the LED panels, most people says that the lighting is insufficient and turning them back on.
Also: Most LED streetlights at Kiryat Ata, are brighter than the former HPS streetlights.
Your opinion?

Your observation is not related to LED lighting, but to 2 other things :

1.
The cause of complaints in your example is you switching off the lighting, not the absolute light levels

2.
Many people want brighter lighting than minimum, sometimes really excessive, sometimes just somewhere above he minimum levels but reasonable. In any case, bringing 125W Mercury lanterns as example ignores 3 decades of HPS and MH inbetween

I don't think so. The Netherlands has a culture in which people often leave their curtains open at night so you can look in. It's still as dim in the evening as it always was. The only change is that there is more variety in color temperatures.
In the incandescent and CFL times, everything was 2700k, with the odd 4000k halophosphate kitchen light visible. Today, i can see mostly 2700k, but with a bit of 3000k too, and 4000k has gotten more common. Now we also see (rarely) 6500k.

Laurens :
The culture here is different. It is very diverse, some people have preferences similar to what you describe, some entirely opposite

I can confirm that there are more people here who will call anything other than 1000 lux 6500K in their living room "bad lighting"

Those existed as far back as i can recall since young age. In the 90's that would be 160W MBFT's in a nice 5 arm chandelier (that one was in a big room of an old house), in the inbetween years that would be with grow-light size CFLs still in the same chandelier, and nowadays it is equivalent light levels with awful flat LED panels



LAB27 :
There are people with 6500K setups, both those who are excessively bright (what we have been discussing here), and who are dim to normal. The latter ones became clearly visible with the CFL boom in the early 00s and now LEDs, but they always were out there, even in the old days with plain 1x20 Fluorescents

Many people, especially in the "i want very bright light" camp, judge the quantity of light by the visible glare from the luminaire and not by the actual light levels resulting in the area. LED luminaires are at the absolute top by glare, so they always appear "good"

In road lighting there is an additional factor : LED luminaires are very highly optimized to make uniform light levels (low Delta) along a theoretical road with perfect luminaire positions

First, "lens panel" optics emit legendary amounts of glare while directing the light to achieve this uniformity (which isn't even required to see well under the light). See reaction to glare above

Second, when the terrain is not an ideal straight road and luminaire positioning is a bit ad-hoc (as it is in virtually all of Hadar for example), the pattern put out by those LEDs will cause over illuminated spots to really stand out, something which is not so obvious with HPS

Color temperature is very strongly correlated to cultural background here. In row homes where families are mostly from western european descent, 2700k.
In apartment blocks, where many of the turkush, morroccan and middle eastern people live, you'll find 4000 and 6500 more often because of the apparent correlation between living near the equator/in a very warm country, and wanting a cooler shade of light.

Always been like that only in the pre-led days, their only choice was 4000k circular (kinda rare) or linear fluorescents in the living room. CFLs we didn't have in 4000k, unless you went for PL but at hardware stores all PL fixtures were meant for outside use. So only the die-hard fans of cold white light would have a brightly shining fluorescent right in their living room.

The fact that lots of people judging the intensity of LED lamps by the glare of it, proves my thoughts about degenerate of the vision of people.
Also: My brother and my father and my mother all preferring >6000K, because they saying it is brighter than 2700K, and my mother because she don't see well with <4000K light.

The judging of lamp brightness by its glare is not result of damage, but simply of the appearance of high glare LED light sources, everywhere where the previous sources were not as glaring :

 - Flat panels with flat light distribution replacing highly directional reflector modular luminaires (4x18W)

 - Floodlights lacking any optics whatsoever replacing way bigger in size HID floodlights which did have optics

This had been going on, and actively abused for sales and promotion, since the earliest days of high power LED lighting, so way before anyone had the time to get vision damage

With additional vision damage the demand for bright light (which tends to correlate with being 6500K, probably to compensate for the degraded S cone cells) will remain the same or increase

Your mom is on one end of the scale, where for many it is the opposite effect. Of those who want bright light like your mom, i wonder how much of it is attributed to actual vision damage (whether from LEDs or just from age and other health factors), vs. how much when actually seeing the same "picture" as me (for example) but claiming that it is not bright enough, in the same cases where i would consider the light level adequate

Higher color temperatures are associated with higher visual acuity, so your mother is right in noting she can see better with that kind of light. Just like with your hearing, your eyesight also can slowly degrade as you get older. I am 35 and still can do fine without glasses, but my parents and grandparents all needed some form of glasses at some point in their life.

I have noticed it myself. I used to light my old bedroom which doubled as electronics workshop with a 40w or 60w bare incandescent in the ceiling. When i switched to a long life incandescent with roughly the same light output, i felt like i couldn't see properly anymore. Those long life things run at a lower temperature so you get a lower CCT. With a 60w longlife i could see less than with a 40w normal one.

For me personally, any higher than 3000k doesn't feel like it has any benefits as workpiece lighting. In the lab at work we have color 830 fluorescents (for now, they'll be ledified in about a year's time...) and 6500k feels like i can't see colors properly anymore unless the light is particularly bright and of a higher CRI than your bog standard LED has to offer.


With regards to glare - how do you define it here? Reflected light from a wet road, or the visibility of the light source in your periferal vision?

Glare is defined by the surface brightness of the light source.