There is a phenomenon that I don't have the ken to name, but it has to do with intensity. An LED producing 500 lumens is a very small aperture with that much light coming out of it. It can be blinding simply due to the intensity, or lumens per square yahtzi. If you compare that to a vintage Cibie Oscar, you could have 500 lumens coming out of one of those beasts, and it would look very dim. (I use the Oscars for illustrative purposes; most people would load them up with bulbs capable of 2000 lumens. You'd probably need to find a 35W H1 to deliver only 500 lumens.)

So many of the vehicles today have the same amount of lumens coming out of their headlamps as the old 7" round lamps had, but now that light is coming from a point source, be it a projector or an LED, that is much smaller than the 7" parabolic reflector that projected the light produced from a tungsten filament in a halogen atmosphere. These lights are annoyingly bright simply due to the intensity., Fortunately, the plastic headlight covers fog up in a couple of years, and they become much less annoying to look at.