Not a non-sequitur - I have said how many nights I have seen where pure VFR flight at night is possible ie not that many but you say night VFR happens all the time in the US.
You can draw 2 possible conclusions from this - 1. There are far more real VFR nights in the US than the UK or 2. People are claiming night VFR when the conditions don't meet the rules
You choose.
As ever you seem to want to trivialise a thread trying to make safety points about an accident because it offends your risk appetite.
Now that post is on point. Concise and clear.
Taking your points in reverse order:
First, in no way is it my desire to trivialize the issues that likely contributed to the subject accident. I fully agree with the consensus of this topic regarding the likely cause, not that that has been at all proven yet (and may never be given the level of destruction of the aircraft).
However, I completely disagree with the idea that people routinely claim night VFR when the conditions don't meet the rules, at least in the US, and that night VFR flight is an unlikely state of affairs, at least in the US.
There are certainly major differences in weather patterns throughout the world. Perhaps that is part of it. Night VFR flight in all classes and categories of powered aircraft (edited to add: for which it is legal) are de rigueur throughout the US. No doubt some take liberties, but not to the extent that there are a noteworthy number of Part 91 accidents. Indeed, most of those sort of issues seem to plague more complex operations like HEMS. That said, I absolutely agree that, as usual, operations unique to helicopters, particularly off-airport departures and arrivals, represent a substantial increase in complexity and risk.
From a more personal perspective, I have never flown at night when legal VFR was not possible, and that includes off-airport operations. This is not to say some of these flights were not challenging. But in no case did they approach a level of advertent or inadvertent flight into essentially IFR conditions. I believe most US pilots are equally responsible even in the face of the less restrictive rules found in the US. If they were not there would be a substantially higher level of night accidents in the US.