It's illegal in this country—the UK—to drive at night without lights. Doesn't stop it happening, though. Either someone forgets to turn the lights on, if they're manually controlled, or they actively turn them off because the UI is ambiguous (this happened to me, once), or the filament bulb burns out (again: filament bulbs are/were mandatory in the UK, originally to rule out carbide lamps without actually banning them), or there's a wiring/software fault.
The point is, vehicle safety measures should be fail-safe, and driving an invisible vehicle at night and relying on lights to make yourself seen is kind of the opposite of that.
This sort of thing wouldn’t happen much when headlights sprayed widely, but newer focused headlights are harder to see from the side.
My family talks about black cows that your headlamps just don't see and how dangerous they are, this would be even more intense.
I also have front and back lights (which I only use when dark as I'm not convinced that they help during the day), hi-viz tape covering parts of my bike, and a large hi-viz sign mounted to the back of my bike as a reflector.
A lot of this I think has to do with distracted driving. I've also read that there's a psychological phenomena where someone might be looking directly at something but still not see it because they didn't expect it. So drivers expect cars on the road, not bikes, so making myself brighter might not help. I would need to make myself look more like a car in this theory. I recall reading someone suggest that looking like a person could help, or having motion (i.e., reflectors on your pedals).
Of course, I don't believe that some sort of perceptual blindness is any excuse. Many people would talk about banning self-driving cars that completely missed certain road users, but I'm not sure most drivers would be as enthusiastic about banning drivers who fail the same test.
After writing my post I've found there's a lot of research in this area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness
1) Their own lights
2) Your own lights bouncing off various corner reflectors [1] on the target car
A law was passed last year requiring pedestrians walking at night to be more visible to cars by wearimg reflective material. I don't think anyone has been charged for not doing it, however when it came into force the police started giving away reflective armbands and then companies started doing the same for promotion. Basically anyone you see with a bag or rucksack has one of these attached.
I don't think there has been a history of racism against dark colored automobiles, so probably slightly less controversial..