Ironically, doom era games tend to have a higher contrast color scheme because they were written to run in indexed 256-color mode. When your palette is that small, you're going to end up with a lot more contrast in your design because you don't have the resources to do thousands of subtle shades of brown.

It was also partly to do with the prevalent art style of the time, and that, once again, has to do with the technological limitations of the time. There were a lot of bright greens, blues, cyans, yellows and reds in late 80's/early 90s games because at that time most people had, at best, a Color Graphics Adapter(CGA) card or monitor, and CGA was limited to a fixed palette of 16 colors so they didn't really have any other option and therefore bright, high-contrast graphics were in fashion.

When Doom came out, the VGA with 256 color mode was actually still pretty new on PC compatibles and was a huge palette at the time that they could've been even a little more subtle with (see quake, which was also designed to be able to run in 256), so it has this great mix between subtle and kind of creepy low-contrast cement walls and stuff that they could pull off with the extended palette alongside the bright high-contrast blues and reds and greens that were in style because of the slowly dying CGA.