Hello,
I am considering buying a really nice home but one thing that bothered me is the foyer area has an oak floor that has these black pegs, don't know if the pegs themselves are wooden or not (how can I tell?) because they are really dark, like black. The whole area looks like bad polka-dots (maybe 3/4 to 1" diameter?), it doesn't look like floors I've seen where the pegs are small and look nice like wooden nails. These just look weird to me. The house was built in the 80s, maybe a trend at the time? I have never seen anything like it so as I try to tally my renovations budget, I wonder:

Can I do anything with refinishing that would get rid of these? Or is my only option to rip out the entire floor if I really ended up disliking the look. I feel bad doing it since the floor itself is in great condition and it looks like it was refinished not too long ago.

Thank you for any education you can give me.

I guess you could drill them out and replace them with oak pegs. The surrounding area would probably get damaged in the process, so unless the floor was finished with no stain and just a clearcoat, you'd have to sand and refinish the whole floor.

do you have any photo's?

You are probably looking at walnut pegs installed into an oak floor. Even with a natural finish, these would be very visible.
This look was already waning by the '80's but when I started installing in mid to late '60's; all the moneyed people "HAD" to have them.
Only clean solution would be to dig them out, replace them with flat cut oak plugs, trying to align the grain patterns to make them as un-obtrusive as possible. This will also involve a full resand and finish though.
Alternatively, you could pretend to a "retro" style in your home and the floor will fit right in.

There is a great chance that those are wooden inserts. If you dislike that look, you will have to replace the entire floor.

maybe you could drill them out trying not to damage the suroundings and replace them with oversized plugs with glue that are prefinished ???

Problem with that idea is, if the plugs are not simply decorative, there will be screws under them that would prevent drilling them out. They could be split out with a small sharp chisel though.

Most floors I've put in like that (Bruce 3-5-7 plank) have plugs that are just decorative

Well they could be decorative if the floor is A: pre-finished, or B: of recent vintage, say 20 years old or less.
When I was a lad, oh so many moons ago, they were installed to conceal the screws that held the end joints in place since there was no tongue and groove joints on the ends.