>> I follow the by-far-dominant approach in scientific literature, where color mapping choice is completely unrelated to physical accuracy of the plotted observations or simulations.
> It is not true at all that this is the dominant approach in the literature
Just to clarify: you are saying that there are not a lot of images in literature rendered with a non-perceptually-uniform colormap (eg, any matplotlib colormap aside from the 5 uniform ones)? Or that there is only one correct way to choose colormap for a given image?
I'm saying that for black hole visualisation, the approach you're using is not necessarily standard in comparable papers. It would not be considered a physically accurate rendering no. People go to great pains to ensure that they're using the correct colour spaces and colour mappings to convey what they intend to convey, eg see the event horizon telescope papers which use perceptually uniform graphs
There is more than one choice as explained previously, it depends on what information you intend to communicate, whereas here the plot doesn't represent anything. I don't want to be rude, but this is plots 101, where the intensity does absolutely matter in your figures at minimum for renderings
I'd very highly recommend trying to create a scale for your work here to observe the problems with the approach in colouring and brightness, to check how it would work if you were to try and take one of these images and publish it in a paper, and compare it against other published intensity plots of black holes. People do make mistakes here, but its usually unintentional and a mixup due to not understanding gamma correction, which does indeed sometimes result in corrections