I do know a bit about cameras, and you're spot on. You will frequently see dash cam footage and night photography blow out the relative highlights and blacken

I do know a bit about cameras, and you're spot on. You will frequently see dash cam footage and night photography blow out the relative highlights and blacken the relative shadows. This is because (cheap) hardware does not have the same dynamic range as human eyes, especially at night. So "properly exposed" it has to make a call to capture light values in the middle somewhere. Those light values too far out the top it interpreted as white, those out the bottom it interpreted as black, created an artificial high contrast version of what a human eye would see. This is pretty intuitive, generally when we're driving down the road with our lights on, we aren't literally moving between pools of black, often in many urban areas I'll even forget to turn my lights on because I can see well enough. You MAY be able to get a VERY BAD interpretation post processing of what a human would see by increasing the brightness of those pixels near the black threshold.