>Human light intensity perception is not linear... You have to nonlinearize at some point of the pipeline

Why exactly? My understanding is that gamma correction is effectively a optimization scheme during encoding to allocate bits in a perceptually uniform way across the dynamic range. But if you just have enough bits to work with and are not concerned with file sizes (and assuming all hardware could support these higher bit depths), then this shouldn't matter? IIRC unlike crts, LCDs don't have a power curve response in terms of the hardware anyway, and emulate the overall 2.2 trc via LUT. So you could certainly get monitors to accept linear input (assuming you manage to crank up the bit depth enough to the point where you're not losing perceptual fidelity), and just do everything in linear light.

In fact if you just encoded the linear values as floats that would probably give you best of both worlds, since floating point is basically log-encoding where density of floats is lower at the higher end of the range.

https://www.scantips.com/lights/gamma2.html (I don't agree with a lot of the claims there, but it has a nice calculator)