This was an exciting feature, as it ensured the dark mode experience could remain consistent and Chrome users wouldn’t have to suddenly shield their eyes when a website was brighter than anticipated.
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Google’s decision to roll back the forced dark mode was discovered by Android Police, which noticed that the latest version of Chrome Canary (a development build used to test the latest and greatest additions to Chrome) no longer possessed flags indicating the forced dark mode’s existence. Scrapping this project may be upsetting, but it’s entirely possible that Google just couldn’t get it to work properly. It’s easy to imagine how difficult it would be to force a website into dark mode, as that would mean all color codes would automatically need to change. Most websites operate on a white background with black text, but dark mode requires a black background with white text. Things get even more complicated when you consider other colors in the spectrum along with how images blend in with backgrounds. This could have easily lead to a handful of broken websites, and this is likely the reason why Google abandoned the project. We likely won’t see a return of this dark mode when Chrome 86 goes stable this fall, but it might spring up again in the future if Google figures out a more reasonable method of implementing it.
