I think one important question that may be different for different people is why you want reduced effects. Is it because the effects make parsing what's happening in the game difficult? Is it because it's impacting your PC/console's performance? Risk of epilepsy, etc? Or just personal preference?

Because different reasons behind a request can have different ranges of viable solutions. For example, if you're having trouble parsing what's happening in the game because of the overwhelming amount of effects, well, that's something that impacts pretty much everyone! So in theory that could be solved by allowing individual users to lower their effects settings, but it seems to me that a more optimal solution would be for the game's effects to be designed such that they don't interfere with your average user's ability to tell what's going on in content. Etc. Which is just to say that the "why" is important!