Muted palette generator
Nearest named colour: gray
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Generates muted colours; low saturation at middling lightness, which reads as considered and restrained rather than washed out.
How to use the muted palette generator
Muted palettes are the workhorse of interface design for a reason: a saturated colour used across a whole screen becomes fatiguing, and it leaves nowhere to go when something genuinely needs attention. Keeping the palette muted reserves saturation as a signal. The usual construction is a muted set for everything and one saturated accent for the thing you want clicked. Muted colours also survive being shown on cheap displays and in bright light better than pastels do, because they sit in the middle of the lightness range.
Questions
Both have low saturation. Pastels are light; muted colours sit at middling lightness, so they hold up better as a background for text.
Because saturation is a signal. If everything is saturated, nothing stands out, and a saturated full screen is tiring to look at.
Not necessarily. A palette generator arranges hues; it says nothing about contrast. Check any text-on-background pair against the contrast checker before shipping it.
Hex for anything going into a design tool, HSL when you want to adjust lightness by hand, and OKLCH when you need two colours to look equally light; it is the only one of the four where that number means what you expect.
Keep the palette muted and pick one saturated colour for the action you want taken.