Body text isn't the issue I would think - it's various headers, downvoted and especially "dead" posts which are almost to read without selecting the text, even with perfect colour vision.

(oops, missing word 'impossible' after 'almost' there)

I can tell you that it still looks rather low-contrast and makes it harder to read for me.

This is also in part because of human perception, i.e. it wouldn't be as bad if the rest of the page had the same level of gray for the text. Because it is not the case the darker parts suck your focus in. If you want people to actually read your text, that is a pretty stupid move and just shows how serious you can take all that spam on this page.

Why would I care about that standard? I have my own eyes, I also see a lot of other examples of text that don't race to the standard bottom

Also, you've miss the elephant at the top of the page