Terrible contrast? Firefox's accessibility inspector gives the text a contrast ratio of 15.17, with 4.5 being the minimum for what qualifies as good and 7 as the recommended minimum for good readability.

I change text colours in the web inspector a lot because plenty of websites these days are medium gray on light gray with a font-weight of 100, but this clearly isn't one of them. It's fine to say you don't like the colour, but the contrast is great.