After upgrading to Kubuntu 26.04 LTS my screen brightness stopped being adjustable. The only way I found to fix it was by modifying the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT entry in /etc/default/grub to:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=native i915.enable_dpcd_backlight=0"
So if you're having this issue, hope this is helpful