There was a time where lights were too big to be on headlamps. Many of us of a certain vintage grew up holding what were essentially metal cages around regular household light bulbs attached to a power cable for our parents and grandparents while they worked on carburetors or whatnot.

Did you call them "drop light" or "trouble light" (Drop light for me)

It's funny you mention that ... I have both discovered and forgotten the novelty of a headlamp at least 5 times in the last decade.

At the time (1980s), I'm not sure there were very many good headlamp options but either way, I wasn't in control of the portable light purchasing decisions.

However, the man who's job it was didn't skimp much. He was a small plane pilot, so I recall being warned not "to look into this flashlight[0]." It looked not much different than you're typical consumer flashlight, but if you picked it up, it was much thicker plastic, used 4 C batteries and no joke, it hurt your eyes to look into.

[0] The flashlight has a switch and a button on it, the button lets you flicker the light for emergency visual signalling (the kind that a pilot might need for the very specific situation of "need to flash morse-code through the windscreen at the ATC tower to get landing clearance because I was struck by lightning and my radios are all fried" -- so ... bright.