Depends how you use the lighting as much as anything. Firstly there’s been a bit of an arms race with lights. Cars got brighter (HID and then LED), bike lights followed (although arguably that was just offroad tech moving to more mainstream). Cars now have daytime running lights, cycle light manufacturers therefore make daylight visible LEDS. And so on.
When I’m commuting through town, I’m quite often filtering down the middle of lines of traffic so I want my front lights to be bright flashy things that bounce off street signs and rear view mirrors and clearly shout “bike coming through”. I’m not worried about oncoming traffic, it’s the queues of cars with their back to me that I want to alert.
When I’m riding country lanes at night, I want to see the road and also alert oncoming cars so a pool of steady light pointed down at the road and a small flashy thing pointing ahead works perfectly.
And if I get stuck on a mountainside at night, my lights will flash SOS too. Assuming I’m actually conscious to press the button in the right sequence to get it to do that…
