At the beginning you should adjust the brightness with “Exposure”. At dt it says that you don’t have to pay attention to the clipping for the time being, that will be fixed later.
Is that the same with ART? How much can you increase “Exposure” in the first step? Should we only aim for the appropriate mid-range tonal values for the time being, or should we already pay attention to the white point here?
And, if you have clipping highlights, is it enough to reduce them with “Tone Equalizer” and “Whites”?
You can increase exposure as much as you want, the data won’t be clipped until the tone curve, so you can use all the tools before that to bring back your highlights. These include: tone equaliser, dynamic range compression, log encoding, and color/tone correction in local edits. In addition, you can also use “CLF LUTs” in Film Simulation to do tone mapping towards the end of the pipeline (see here and here for more info).
However:
mostly, no. You can have a workflow centered around “mid gray” as darktable, but this is by no means required. You can continue using a more “WYSIWYG” workflow (i.e. display-referred) just fine.
(you can also do scene-referred if you want, but only if you want and you know why you want it 
HTH
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It is very reassuring to hear that there is no problem with the clippig for now. Only one thought I unfortunately do not understand yet. What do you mean by: …until the tone curve? Do you mean that you only have to be careful with the tone curve because it can clip?
The tone curve will clip (at the specified white point). If you don’t want that – because you know what you are doing – just turn it off (and be warned that there are other modules after tone curve that clip – see the notes about the pipeline in the wiki).
HTH
Now the world is all right again. I had misunderstood it at the beginning, I first thought they were miracle modules that automatically avoid clipping. Now I see that you can exaggerate the brightness with almost all modules and thus clipping can occur.
That is quite logical and I have to pay attention to the clipping myself, have done it so far.
Thank you for your patience.