Maybe but would such advanced technology look borked?
Please don't try to find lazy lore explainations for broken lighting. The Devs already admited that the lighting is not working as intended.
sure the lighting is not perfect, but no game has perfect lighting, likewise lots of people have crap eyesight at night IRL anyway, likewise anyone who has spent significant amounts of time outside in the middle of nowhere at night when there is a clear sky any no moon can attest that is not as dark as many people think, go to places where there is less light absorbing plants etc or they are covered in snow, or there are no plants just barren light sand/earth and again its lighter than the likes of say the rich green-ness of the UK at an equivalent time on a clear night, throw the moon into the mix and things get much brighter, to the point shadows will be cast be objects from the "moonlight" which you can easily see.
now if we were to travel the stars like in ED, one of the most basic (besides oxygen and life support and food etc etc) prerequisites would be a means to cope with the vast ranges of light and UV etc, which range from the incredibly bright to the dark (far darker than here on earth [unless your underground or in a windowless box]), now the technology to cope with the incredibly bright is nothing new, given a high amperage welding arc puts out more localised light, heat and IR/UV than the sun dose, weld for 1/2 an hour with exposed skin, that skin will be like you spent the day out in the sun and within a couple of hours is starting to peal, yet the technology to protect your eyes from photokeratitis using auto-darkening welding masks is <$200 mass market technology with reaction times of 1/20000th second or less, which has a darkening range from near fully transparent like looking through a normal bit of clear thick plastic to near fully dark, so if you were to look up at the sun you would not see it, unless you manual adjust the threshold down (normal range is shade 8 or 9 through to 13 to 16).
after all photokeratitis is nothing new relatively speaking in other than name, regardless of if you were the Inuit of north America and Siberia or the Sámi of northern Scandinavia and Finland sporting the latest in whalebone or driftwood technology to cope with snow/ice/water blindness, or the hot desert dowelling peoples sporting dark pigments smeared under and above the eye to cut down glare from the sand/parched barren earth.
now granted making thing lighter is somewhat harder, and that currant technologies are a collection of individual ones from light intensifying like night vision, to thermal IR with WH/BH greyscale or colour intensity, but there is no reason not to believe given the advancements of the last 130 years that the next 1200 or so years aren't going to see this tech amalgamated into a helmet visor that can transition to dark like welding mask using LCD and photovoltaics giving clear to dark, while also being able to use light intensification and thermal IR to render an intensified real time true colour image on the said visor using its inbuilt LCD elements in the visor.
after all we do have the paradox that we are playing ED on monitors using an RGB scale, so whey shouldn't there be an RGB like LCD hue to what we see in the game-world that can auto lighten/darken to cope with our environment, rather than being dark age luddite plebs with little comprehension of yesterdays technology yet alone to possibilities given 1000 or more years.
