When I was born HPS was king, but I did take note of the MV lights around, namely noticing that they were whiter. I also had noticed the stickers on the doors and noticed that the white-light street lights all either had no sticker or a blue sticker while the "normal" orange-light street lights mostly had yellow, metallic, or white stickers (the white simply being faded yellow; the mid-90s GE NEMA tags were known for that).
I had never seen an incandescent street light for the longest time but when I was 5 years old I saw my first two incandescent street lights when we moved into my current house. Both are gone now. When we first moved in, neither one worked. Then one randomly started working again (must've been an open fuse or something on the pole, or maybe they actually did replace the bulb, which I doubt). Then the working one was removed with no replacement and the never-working one was replaced with a 50W HPS M-250R2 on a brand new arm.
The one that was fixed before being removed was on the older pole here. the newer pole was there long before the light was removed (and the old pole is still there...) so I'm not sure why it was removed. Even more unsure why it was fixed lol. My only guess is that there was an open circuit that was fixed unrelated to the light.
This is where the light that never worked was located. The pole was replaced and the old light simply wasn't transferred over. So new pole, arm, and light! I think the M-250R2 might have stopped working though. TBH I don't pay attention to it.
Here's an incandescent light I found on streetview. When I drove by at night, I saw that there was a 50W HPS M-250R2 in its place, but they kept the old arm. And
the other light on the street was a radial wave as well. It was also replaced with a 50W HPS M-250R2 that looked quite recent, but it didn't work!