Virtually every bulb in our winter house and the cottage have been replaced, as they blew, with CFLs. The light is fine, they do indeed last much longer than the incandescents and my kw usage is substantially less than it used to be. As for the mercury, well, when I was a kid we used to play with it on our desks at school...which may go a long way to explaining the 60s!
That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.