I don't blind people, I have HIDs and the projectors are still functioning well enough to get a razor sharp cutoff. Current ones aren't even that bright, still on the original Hella E55s which are a lousy projector and burn out quickly.

But I also don't get blinded by oncoming factory LEDs like, ever. It happens about as often as with old pre-projector halogens that spew their (admittedly dimmer) light all over the place. Which is to say, never.

Which leads me to think that perhaps the people who say they used to get blinded less back in the day and can barely see now, have gotten worse eyesight over the years, rather than LEDs in particular being the problem.

OR maybe it's yet another North America special, where everyone's driving tall as fuck trucks with their low beams aimed straight forward, especially in retrofitted LED lights. Doing any of that near me would be highly illegal, which is why pretty much the only times I get blinded by LEDs, it's some asshole's lightbar they decided to install to supplement their high beams instead of fixing whatever is fucked up with their headlights. Somehow that's the one loophole we have: You can have super bright additional lighting on your car as long as it's ONLY high beam.

I actually was asked one time why I didn't do that myself when I had crappy burnt out headlights and decided to go the more expensive route of getting brand new bi-xenon projectors installed in a car I had (~500€ all in for parts, installation, polishing, and of course it came with a pair of new high-end bulbs, also included in that price, compared to ~100€ for a super bright stupid fucking LED lightbar). My answer was that I wanted my low beams to be good too, so I don't have to switch over at the last possible moment and blind everyone with a light bar. I was right, too. I barely even felt the need to use the high beams, and NOBODY flashed at me for my low beams, which were about 20x brighter than the burnt out OE projectors. Like those HIDs were brighter than many people's LEDs after that, compared to the old E55s (as you can probably tell, I hate the Hella E55, super common bi-xenon projectors in 00s German cars and even some Japanese ones), which made my old 1992 Audi 80's halogens look bright. And not a single time did anyone flash at me. I even asked a friend to drive towards me and tell me if I was blinding him. Nope. Two days later, said headlight restoration/upgrade actually saved me from hitting a couple of deer hiding in bushes, so there's a point for bright headlights. I can see well enough without them, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't have seen those deer. I don't think anyone could have with dim headlights.