I think, from past reading, that some of the shift to white

well, or at least light colors

may have been with the intention of making interiors brighter. Like, more reflected light, so for a given amount of light from windows or from lamps, the room is better lit.

Like, I remember a lot of 1970s-era stuff looking dark and shadowed. Dark wood paneling and often darker furniture. If you look at photos of house interiors that people took, a lot were also kinda dark. The 1960 and 1970 shots from the above article aren't dark, but those are gonna be professionally-taken pieces, might have light diffusers or whatever set up for the shot. If you have light colored stuff all over, the light bounces around more, get more diffuse lighting.

You can do even better if you do things like have mirrored walls, but that's fragile and can be obnoxious.

So it might have been a shift based on functionality to try to get more and more-diffuse lighting, and white just happened to be the most-reflective color.

Today we can do energy-efficient diffuse lighting with things like LED strips. If wanting more diffuse light is the dominant factor causing a shift towards white, I wonder if extensive use of that might reduce the desire for light colors. Though...that doesn't help where one is relying on sunlight during the day.

There are passive devices that can gather sunlight. I remember that sailing ships used to use these glass things that were flush with the deck but had a sort of crystal shape to pipe more light down to the top deck. That wasn't a lot of light

ship interiors were dark

but maybe we could use some combination of that and other stuff.

searches

Apparently I'm thinking of a deck prism.

According to Wikipedia, something analogous was used in buildings, but electric lighting kind of killed it off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prism_lighting

Prism lighting is the use of prisms to improve the distribution of light in a space. It is usually used to distribute daylight, and is a form of anidolic lighting.

Prism lighting was popular from its introduction in the 1890s through to the 1930s, when cheap electric lights became commonplace and prism lighting became unfashionable. While mass production of prism lighting systems ended around 1940,[1] the 2010s have seen a revival using new materials.[2]