Ah, wonderful...so I'm not the only one.
The extremely white look gets me too, since I'm partially photosensitive. Or at least my eyes are anyway.
I was actually using a theme on Opera from a website called userstyles.org or something, which made Steemit dark, much like the current Night Mode setup (also has a bunch of website skins that turn popular white-themed websites into dark themed ones...it's fantastic), but which ceased working after Steemit got a design layout. So obviously I was happy to suddenly spot the Night Mode feature, except I then discovered that it was session based and got a little annoyed at that.

Your friend's response wasn't too unlike mine when I first discovered it tho XD