Also, I think it was a mistake switching street lamps over to cool color tones, something that happened amid the clean energy push.

I helped.

Ida know, can someone comment on whether that actually does reduce noise in whatever information is needed to drive safely?

This is hard to discuss without context: country, big city, town/village, and freeway.

Big city driving: in a well-lit city, one could almost get by with just the position lights on. I say almost because of 1. driving in unusually dark areas and 2. regular headlights project light at a good angle to catch reflection off of cyclists. My point is that not much light is needed. Also, anyone driving in the city with their high-beams or fog lights on should be ticketed at an increasing rate.

town/village is roughly the same as a big city, but with less public lighting and fewer marked crossings. So, basically, this is just a reasonable low bean scenario. I'd argue that setting up for this situation and accepting it for the big city is good enough.

Country driving: bright and wide. Doing 80-100 km/h+ in the country and I want to see far and wide. Great use of high beams. Auto high beams do not function well enough to respect other drivers and drivers seems to have forgotten what it means when someone flashes their high beams. I attribute that to ignorant/lazy/entitled drivers

freeway: Need to be able see directly ahead and be visible to other drivers. Low beams when other are around, high beams when no one is in front of me and the road isn't lit.

Trucks vs cars: As we all know, headlights on trucks are too high compared to small cars. While this can be mitigated by not looking directly at the lights. A problem with this: If I'm at an intersection and there is a truck with bright lights that I am trying not to look at, I miss the immediate area near the truck with a possible pedestrian. Plus the contrast of the bright lights hides dark pedestrians. My quick Chat GPT'ing says that physically lowering the lights would not decrease the effectiveness of retroreflectors, so mounting the lights lower seems like a good option. There could even be separate high beams that are mounted physically higher when needed.

We all know this is bad and we just can't work together to get something done. Not to mention that even if there are new standards, it would take 10+ years for them to really matter because of the existing cars on the roads.