There may be third party solutions to this. The management around here is very conservative about changing things and explicitly has policies to "Move slow and preserve things" (as opposed to "Move fast and break things"). So, as a guess, the answer to that is probably "No" or, at best, "Not any time soon."
But the management is very tolerant of and even warmly welcomes the fact that the membership includes a lot of programmers and we tend to get a lot of third party solutions.
Off the top of my head, I don't know of an HN reader thingy in dark mode, but asking if those exist is much more likely to get you an immediately available solution than asking management to alter the appearance of HN in some specific way.
The thing is that this is a CSS change, which makes it declarative, which means it would almost certainly not "break" anything. Also, if it were made optional via a personal setting or by hooking into the user's system-level setting (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...), it wouldn't even be a "change" for anyone who doesn't want it to be.
I understand and respect the general philosophy, but I fail to see how this particular request could be anything but a strict improvement.
I'm not in charge around here. My opinions about what I have observed over the last decade are just that: My opinions.
Feel free to prove me wrong and talk management into making such a change. But talking at me to convince me I'm wrong is probably not really the way to do that. I have zero decision-making authority in this matter.
Well, let's hope you win. I'm disinclined to use browser extensions and the like, but would likely use a dark mode setting on HN if it existed. I use dark mode on Twitter and they have a really, really nicely done dark mode.
But the management is very tolerant of and even warmly welcomes the fact that the membership includes a lot of programmers and we tend to get a lot of third party solutions.
Off the top of my head, I don't know of an HN reader thingy in dark mode, but asking if those exist is much more likely to get you an immediately available solution than asking management to alter the appearance of HN in some specific way.