Well, that too, but what I meant to say was… I mean, taking into consideration that implementing something so flexible might be difficult, it seems reasonable for developers to take any short cuts which might make it easier to implement.
You’re bang-on the money. I’m negative for ME but I’ve been tested more than once, you’ve got the right idea. All my displays are on minimum brightness, low contrast mods everywhere, no(or very fast) animations, reduced motion options on everywhere, and a modified sound theme. You’ve got it 100% right. And yes, it would make a terrible default 
I started to list a bunch of similar changes I make, just to demonstrate, but deleted it when I realised how insanely long that list really was going to be (like… Wow.). I feel that I should say: KDE already does handle stuff like this incredibly well.