People here have no idea how any of this works, or why the lighting was off.

CRT monitors did not display light intensity linearly. Remember gamma ? That was it, gamma correction. Gpu chips at the time practically had to have that in. And it didn't even matter that much if it was a bit off because our eyes are not linear. Like remember quake ? Nobody cared quake was not color accurate.

The gpu manufacturers knew it all, be it nvidia, ati, 3dfx. Color spaces were well known, and nobody had a color accurate monitor at home anyway. Even today you can buy a monitor that's way off.

Maybe that guy did get them to care more about it, but I can not read such a "hateful" article to make a conclusion (I did skim it).

Anyway none of it matters now when color is in 32bit floats and all the APIs support multiple color spaces.