There are actually a lot of photosynthesizers that utilize that green light(and thus look purple as they don't absorb the redder and bluer ends of the visible spectrum, here's
one group and I'll refer to them as "purple photosynthesizers") and they're hypothesized to have come about before the green photosynthesizers that are dominant today. It's called the "
Purple Earth Hypothesis" and the key points supporting it are:
- The mechanism that purple photosynthesizers use is simpler and thus likelier to have evolved first(they use retinal, which our vision is also based on too)
- It makes sense for photosynthesis to evolve to first take advantage of the most abundant part of the spectrum of light available to them as that'd confer the greatest and most immediate advantage
- Existing purple photosynthesizers are extremophiles that can live anaerobically(which the Earth was far in the past) and the logic is that they were driven to be such by oxygenic, green photosynthesizers who wiped most of them out
Plants and other green photosynthesizers definitely could handle taking in green light though at places further from the equator(like the poles), without even having to adjust their biology much if it's a matter of them not being able to handle the amount of said light. You can also imagine how advantageous it'd be if they could photosynthesize green light when they're in the undergrowth as that becomes the most available light to them. In a way, they kind of can make use of that green light via the usage of pigments that can convert it, although I imagine there's a number of reasons as to why that's seemingly not done so much.
The implication of that hypothesis is very cool to me though and it's that green photosynthesizers later evolved to use what the purple ones didn't and that eventually they completely drove them off later on and thus the reason that we have green plants over purple ones is because of that ancient shift.
It also means that we could make retinal photosynthesis-based plants with just a little bit of genetic engineering 