You're quite right. An awful lot of "upselling to LED" is actually making you accept less light. However that is not necessary.
Lumens are lumens are lumens, but you don't want those lumens.
A standard lumen test rig is a sphere. They put the bulb at the center of the sphere and the bulb gets credit for all lumens cast in all directions. That gives obsolete lights a huge advantage, since they naturally emit in a sphere, even though at least 50% and usually more like 90% of their light is in the wrong direction.
Why would we ever want a sphere of light? 50% of it would be wasted as skyglow. Look at how you actually use lights; the only light you actually want is a wedge - typically 30-60 degrees, maybe 120 degrees for a post light.
A barn light? Classic faceplant fail is this intense spot of light on the barn below the light. It's completely useless: we don't need to know there's a barn there. We know there's a barn there. What we need is the grass/grounds *beyond the barn* lit up. About a 45 degree wedge, starting 25 degrees away from the barn to 70 degrees away, is just about right.
With obsolete lights, we try to recover the wayward light with reflectors, but forget that. They don't work. Doubt me, touch the reflector on a metal halide light, goodbye fingerprints. The reflector is absorbing more energy than it's reflecting.
On the other hand, my GE lights have plastic bezels below them, with fresnel lenses molded into them. They run barely warm; lenses are very efficient. A light that only throws 160 degrees is ideal for lenses.
LEDs only throw light in about a 140 degree wedge. And that is all the lumen machine will give them credit for. In other words, LEDs are penalized for aiming
For instance I tore out an array of 400 watt metal halides up on poles, lighting up a yard area (and half the neighborhood). I replaced with 30 degree and 8 degree LED spotlights, that are aimed exactly where we want the light. As a result I replaced 3200W of light with like 250W. I'm getting far fewer lumens, but those are the lumens I want!
So you can do it, but if you get a cheaply designed fixture that just tosses lumens bric-a-brac so the seller can claim 7000 lumens, it'll perform poorly. That would be typical of the Alibaba swill sold on the Amazon Marketplace. But if you go with a well designed light, or what I like are automotive off-road lights with a DC power supply, then yeah, you get to throw light exactly where you want.
I have also hacked old metal halide barn lights by mounting a cheapie floodlight *inside* the bezel. At first glance it looks like a metal halide light, But it's really an LED throwing the light downward through the hole in the bottom of the bezel, positioned and aimed to light the part of the yard I want lit. This isn't as effective as a well-aimed light, but it looks OK. And it's cheap!
