"Even two cheap digital cameras one tuned to see the darker range and the other brighter"

Sounds a lot like rods and cones in our eyes, huh?

There's another difference with eyeballs that would almost certainly have helped here - the low light sensitive peripheral vision that the rods provide is also attuned to movement, we're more sensitive to movement in peripheral vision as well as being better able to see in low light.

You wouldn't need two different cameras, just one camera shooting HDR video (alternating between over/underexposing the frame so that no information is clipped) to get a clear image at all exposure levels.

Eyeballs are pretty good at night vision once adjusted, but good high sensitivity cameras can be much better. And let's not get started on LIDAR/RADAR... it seems clear to me that this was not a sensory deficiency, it was poorly designed/tested software.

No, much more like the iris in our eye. Turn on a bright light inside a car and see how hard it is to see outside on a dark night. Modern HDR cameras have a much higher dynamic range than the human eye. Hence the surreal HDR photos you see.