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