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I think that mostly the idea behind not using 255 as your white makes sense to a certain degree, as does not using 0 for black (unless you're modelling vantablack!) - and I think it stems from when render engines & specifically their shaders weren't physically correct (i.e. didn't obey the laws of thermodynamics) so for example if you had a 225 white diffuse and a 225 white reflection it would actually reflect more light than it receives and so on.
However if we continue on this trend where we keep pushing these values more and more towards mid grey we are going to end up in a situation whereby the entire colour palette ranges from about 120 to 140 and contrast is non-existent. Thankfully all of the major render engines these days respect the laws of thermodynamics and even if you use pure white and pure black you should still get a decent render because the shaders take into account energy conservation, which is why I wouldn't get to worried about these values as a whole. Ideally you want to achieve an exposure where something that has a black colour in your scene renders black, and something that is white renders white so that any other values fall neatly in between and no (crucial) pixel information is lost to clipping.
However if we continue on this trend where we keep pushing these values more and more towards mid grey we are going to end up in a situation whereby the entire colour palette ranges from about 120 to 140 and contrast is non-existent. Thankfully all of the major render engines these days respect the laws of thermodynamics and even if you use pure white and pure black you should still get a decent render because the shaders take into account energy conservation, which is why I wouldn't get to worried about these values as a whole. Ideally you want to achieve an exposure where something that has a black colour in your scene renders black, and something that is white renders white so that any other values fall neatly in between and no (crucial) pixel information is lost to clipping.
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