I haven't watched the video, and in all honesty, I don't care about those people. I don't even have to watch their video to know that they're just
commoners who know nothing about vintage lighting. Are they saying that LED's don't flicker? If so, that's enough proof that they don't know what
they're talking about. I've seen many, many LED's flickering, whether it be visible flicker, or hertz flicker similar to what we see from magnetic
ballasts. All this talk of headaches... the LED's should be very well known to cause headaches, for numerous reasons, even more than fluorescent.
But, the average person has been brainwashed into thinking that LED's are better... so much to the point where flickering, fails, cheap quality
and atrocious color... all of this gets ignored and sometimes even defended.

Poor quality LEDs flicker just as much as magnetic ballasts fluorescents. Cheap LED bulbs often will have banding.

Also, sometimes people mistake daylight LED bulbs for fluorescents. Another thing that makes no sense is when people say most early CFLs emit a bluish white, when that is not true, as daylight CFLs weren’t even popular in the late 90s to mid 2000s. They couldn’t easily be found in stores. Most CFLs were 2700K for a while, daylight CFLs didn't gain popularity until right before LEDs did too, which was the very late 2000s. Finding a vintage preheat CFL in daylight is an extreme rarity.

Also, it seems like in residential applications, magnetic ballasts were used well into the 2000s. Not sure what the deal was with that, but some homes from the 2000s have used magnetic ballasts. But, in commercial applications, magnetic ballasts were phased out by the mid 90s. I believe some companies sold “residential ballasts” which were essentially just magnetic rapid start ballasts.

I still don't understand how the LED eventually became the most efficient light source if @Ash said that everyone began to recommend LED when its lumen efficacy was highly inferior compared to most traditional light sources?

Very simple: technological progress. Already in the mid 2000s it was safe to assume that leds would keep getting more efficient every year for decades.

The first incandescent lamp experiments were extremely underwhelming. Carbon filament lamps ran barely any warmer than a basic oil lamp, and it took a while before they were as cheap to run too. Yet, because we assumed technological advances would keep being made, we continued advocating for their use. And in the end, i am happy they plodded along with crappy, short lived, orange lamps until we hit the 1920s and the double spiral drawn tungsten filament lamp with gas filling was invented.
The original engineers did not get discouraged by the fact that their invention was barely (if at all) better than candles and oil lamps.

The first gas discharge lamps sucked too. But it took about 50 years before efficiency stopped making huge leaps in efficiency, and until the 1990s that we essentially reached peak performance. It was a good assumption that the same would happen with LEDs.

And just look at @Ash's discovery for a second.

> LEDs are the best choice for nearly all outdoor lighting applications.
> You browse our selection of outdoor LED lighting here

Invent a problem, sell the solution. There's also an LED vs incandescent/halogen savings calculator that outputs a number of dollars saved even without taking in the cost of one unit, and the wattage of original and replaced lamps. This is utter propaganda, and has no doubt contributed to the popularization of LEDs.

And as Alec had said somewhere, people associated CFLs with the then-crappy cool daylight fluorescent tube lights and grouped them together. Although this is a region specific thing, in some places, 2700K was not very popular and cheap 6500K does start looking blue-ish 7000K, but this does NOT mean they "emit blue light" like most modern LEDs.

Fun fact and off topic, "Alec," is actually my name as well, though of course, he is not me.

@suzukir122 what a coincidence!

It never ends. Just one quick search on youtube later:

https://youtu.be/nCrgCLTxRaI?t=75
"Even cataracts [...] may be connected [to CFLs]."
From the same video, 01:56 https://youtu.be/nCrgCLTxRaI?t=116
"...a typical CFL contains 4 milligrams of mercury, an element famously toxic to humans and animals"
the graphic then shows a label "100% AMALGAM", at least try and make the graphic not DIRECTLY AGAINST YOUR POINT?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFyTWrgnRJ8 see 1:17
"...working under this light can lead to problems like sleep-pattern disruption, cancer and migraine headaches."
Because obviously, CFLs emit enough UV light to cause cancer. No comment. And if you search further, you're bound to find more and more of this ridiculous misinformation.