It's just an illustrative example. A real incident pit is dangerous because you need the experience to recognise one, and you need the courage to be the one that aborts a dive that people might have traveled a long way, paid money, etc to do. Fortunately you can just say "incident pit" and everyone will immediately perform their own independent analysis, if they're experienced.
The "problem" with modern regulated torch designs is that they don't appreciably dim as the power runs down; they're bright and then they just stop over the course of a few seconds. Old designs you could easily spot when the batteries were ready to be replaced/recharged well in advance.
But you just stared down the incident pit?
You still have multiple layers of security, but normalizing the removal or weaking of one goes against the point of having the multiple layers in the first place.
In your example you seem screwed immediately?