Well, what I'm to say here… If you are site owner and you feel that colors hurt conversion/number of visitors/time spent on page/whatever else you care about — you probably should change the colors. If you are a visitor and you feel that colors of the site you'd like to use discourage you to do so — you probably need to help yourself and make a custom CSS of your own (using Stylish or something) to satisfy your very unique needs or just use one of many services like http://readable.tastefulwords.com/ .
Anything else: rebel all you want, nobody fucking cares.
My personal humble opinion, btw: the "unreadable" examples are much more readable and easier on the eyes, than eye-burning "readable" ones. So I could as well go around rebelling about white on black or black on white, but I won't, because it's stupid, I follow my own advices and use Pocketbook for long reads anyway.
> If you are a visitor and you feel that colors of the site you'd like to use discourage you to do so — you probably need to help yourself and make a custom CSS of your own
This attitude is hostile to a wide range of people who already have to fight the computer to get things done and shouldn't have to fight the stupid decisions made by bad designers.
> nobody fucking cares.
For various values of "nobody" including "some people", where some people means any group subject to various disability discrimination laws in whatever countries they operate in.
Hostile? I would call it "fair". Because, ok, let's assume you win. I'm wrong, you're right, and some ultimate dictator decides that all websites now are coming in black-on-white only. What should I do, as a person that feels low-contrast is much nicer than eye-burning one? Exactly, I'm about to make my own customizations or suffer. And then you should be saying, that black-on-white is hostile to me, which wouldn't make much sense, as you (or somebody else for that matter) would have something to complain on either way.
Hence my first point about "if it hurts conversion/…". In other words, if it's your business — it's your business. If it's not — well, you are free to complain about other people coloring their stuff as they like all you want, but I hope they won't be upset about that, because they really shouldn't be, and believing that your point of view is the only right one (even if it's supported by some Nielsen or whatever) is simply ignorance.
I agree that too high contrast is also wrong. Notice how the submitted website does not use black text on a white background anywhere? No one is asking for maximum contrast. People are asking for good contrast, and that includes "not black on white".
Asking visitors to make adjustments to their taste is far easier and less hostile than asking a webdev to create a webpage which uses colors that every person who visits it will like. In fact, it's not just hostile to the webdev, but impossible.
Anything else: rebel all you want, nobody fucking cares.
My personal humble opinion, btw: the "unreadable" examples are much more readable and easier on the eyes, than eye-burning "readable" ones. So I could as well go around rebelling about white on black or black on white, but I won't, because it's stupid, I follow my own advices and use Pocketbook for long reads anyway.