Some comments:
-- Have you tried adjusting your environment? Making sure your room is brighter versus darker? Light added behind a screen?
-- What kind of lightbulbs do you use in your room? Do you get strain from various kinds of lightbulbs?
-- No, IPS glow doesn't tend to affect amount of blue light. But the overall brightness of the black may. But it's often less than one-hundredth the amount of blue light of a bright screen.
-- Higher Hz doesn't affect blue light. But can help you a huge deal if you have eye pain from motion blur.
-- Have you tried televisions too see if viewing distances play a role in your eye pain?
-- Yes, dimmer means less blue light. Halving backlight brightness on a monitor will halve blue light.
-- F.Lux doesn't fix the blue light still being emitted by the grey colored blacks, so dimming the backlight AND using a low color temperature, is usually the best way.
-- "Eye Care Technology" can help but it doesn't always help blue light emission from dark colors/grays (unless they are using high priced backlight LEDs similar to high-CRI LED lightbulbs).
Everybody's screen prescription is different, and Blur Busters are not doctors, but we've from time to time successfully troubleshooted our way (
stutter/blur pain example) but your situation appears different) to a more vision-friendly monitor for an unusual eyestrain case.
PWM-pain, stutter-pain, motionblur-pain, brightness-pain, we've seen it all here (by email, forum, social, etc). Everybody's vision is different. We're a wealth of data on screen-discomfort by sheer accident of being Blur Busters. While it's not our primary topic matter, we'll probably write an article on this topic matter. But your case is a little more complex than average.
Yesterday, CRTs were smaller. Today, screens are bigger and emit more blue light. So we've got a simultaneous onslaught of size/light/blur/brightness/etc changes. So it's not always easy to hone-down the specific category of change. Sometimes it was just the size, sometimes it was just the motion blurring (we're
Blur Busters, after all...), sometimes it was just the blue light, sometimes it's all the above.
That said, you've come to the right place because there is nowhere else on the planet that has seen a reliably huge gamut of display strains (pain from stutter, pain from motion blur, pain from blue light, etc) simultaneously. All those ergonomic recommendations elsewhere are so narrowscope (PWM focussed, blue light focussed, etc). But we're quite broadband as The Perfect Motion Company, in the refresh rate race to retina refresh rates, where displays someday look identical to real life, with identical effects. Displays are still far away from that, creating pains on displays that don't create pain in real life. So without further ado, here's an attempt #1 for you:
Try the following simultaneously
(A) Stick to PWM-free; and
(B) Use your orange glasses; and
(C) Increase viewing distance slightly (use big DPI to see text better) so screen is smaller in your vision field; and
(D) Much lower brightness via monitor controls; and
If monitors won't go dim enough, purchase a neutral density plastic film to put in front of monitor to make it even dimmer. Sometimes those bright monitors become good once you extend their brightness range that way.
(E) Adjust your room lighting so that your screen is
never never never obviously the brightest object nor the dimmest object in the room. Spend the money on proper good lamps with high-CRI light sources (e.g. incandescent lights or CRI 93+ LED which costs more) on a dimmer to rebalance your room lighting; it makes a BIG effect in making screens more friendly. Move those 50 cent LED lightbults to your closets, purchase those "high CRI" dimmable LED bulbs, look for something with a "93" or higher in CRI. And make sure to use high quality LED-optimized dimmers like Lutron rather than the cheap triac-based PWM wall dimmers. Don't settle for anything below CRI 90 with your LED lightbulbs, in your computer room, ever. If you wish, you can even attach the same automation method to all of them if you want to dim them all simultaneously quickly via one touch of a remote/smartphone, so you can more easily rebalance room lighting to match your screen better at night vs day.
IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT: Anything you do to completely prevent your screen from ever being the obviously-brightest object in room, or obviously-dimmest object in room, helps a lot. So do not spend money only just only on the screen; you need to fix your room lighting too in a particularly severe eyestrain problem situation like yours. Screen too dim but brighter screen hurts more? Dim your room. Screen too bright but dimmer screen hurts more? Brighten your room. Screen fine at day but hurts at night? Use dimmer to adjust room lighting to fix. You get the idea. So it's important to install flexibility to adjust your room lighting. Etc.
Fine Tune Tweaks
(G) I don't have enough information if motion blur and stutter are components of your eye pain, but if it is, then also use a high refresh rate (120Hz+) combined with a powerful GPU, combined with VSYNC ON or variable refresh rate (GSYNC/FreeSync). If not using GSYNC/FreeSync, try to keep frame rate matched to refresh rate to prevent strain from stutters;
(H) If you test motion blur reduction again with games, make sure you you also
fix your mouse microstutters too. That said, you appear to have a PWM-pain, and motion blur reduction may not be enough to compensate.
I am no doctor, but so many people overlook some common sense vision ergonomics for eye-pain-sensitive people.