I was there when it all started with Resident Evil 1 on PS-1. The survival horror genre may have existed before that but it was Capcom that brought it to the forefront. There have been so many games that have come since and many of them were actually Resident Evil games.
We have all seen that intro screen where they tell you to adjust your brightness so that certain icons are barely visible and in the past I have complied because I wanted to "true" experience.
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The above image is from Titanfall 2 and that is not a survival horror game at all but the point is kind of the same. These are included so that you can experience the game the way it was intended by the developers but IMO, the devs these days attempt to make a game more difficult by making it too dark.
This isn't a new trend of course although I think it was kind of taken to the nth level in Biohazard during the ship levels where you can barely see anything that is going on around you and therefore, suffer damage because it is pitch black dark and the enemies, conveniently are also black.
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I actually thought that Biohazard was an absolutely fantastic game and I loved it from start to finish: Ok that's not true, the first area where you have to come to terms with the fact that the stalking father is unkillable was something that almost made me quit the game early on. Once I realized that and started over so I could stop wasting ammo on him, the experience was a lot better.
The point here is that I think some games are actually far too dark and this might actually be a lazy "feature" that is put into games by devs intentionally.
I found this fan-made box art that is not a real game and thought to myself that this is what a lot of the survival horror games are like these days. I get that the feeling of being trapped is an important element of SH games, but at a certain point where you are stuck in a corner and don't even know what is in your way it gets to be a bit beyond frustrating. In these sorts of games I will almost always resort to turning the brightness up and just let the immersion be damned.
While I am sure there are a bunch of purists out there that would disagree with this notion on my part, perhaps I play games for a different reason than they do. I play for enjoyment and relaxation as well as a tinge of feeling like I accomplished something. Games are not fun to me if they are frustrating and getting rando-smacked by an enemy that you can't even see at all is not fun in my world. Even Biohazard was guilty of this at multiple points in the game and I quickly got tired of this. Thankfully they didn't overuse it and it wasn't the overall theme of the game like a lot of other ones seem to be.
For a prime example of how I think the darkness is used improperly in games just think of the *Doom" game that was intentionally very dark and you couldn't even fire at enemies while you were holding your flashlight, which was your only method of seeing around you. This game was almost universally hated and the devs eventually patched the game so that the flashlight was always on so that people could actually enjoy the game.
In the meantime, I will almost always turn the brightness up well beyond what the game suggests because I find that it actually takes away from gaming... you know... not being able to see anything :)