Is There a Dark Mode That Respects Native Images

Yes. The trick is to treat pictures differently from the rest of the page.

Modern Dark Mode does use a CSS filter: invert() on the whole page, but it then applies the opposite filter to images, videos, canvases, SVGs and embedded frames, which cancels the inversion so they look close to their original colors. The exception is images a site sets as backgrounds in its stylesheet, which can still come out inverted. Dark Reader's Dynamic mode takes another approach, rewriting the page's colors instead of filtering them, which also leaves images alone.