The article doesn’t really explain why except “maybe someone would like it” but I think the real answer was CGA. CGA was a predecessor color technology to VGA with a different 8 bit color space. So if you took a color scheme for CGA and rendered it on VGA you’d end up with a really garish scene.

When I was a kid I had a DOS game that I played the hell out of. I ended up ruining the disk, and stupidly didn’t have a backup, but the box included a CGA version of the game. It played just fine on my computer except that the colors were trippy on my VGA monitor.

I remember, surprisingly, wondering wtf. "It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow.

The ‘Fluorescent’ theme was also pretty ugly, but it didn’t have a catchy name, so I’ve never heard anything about it."