Most helicopters with one engine (turbine, piston, steam, rodent-powered, whichever...) weren't originally designed to fly at night, and while you or nobody you know has had an engine failure at night, it really only takes one and it's quite likely nobody walks away. Single-engine flight at night in any machine is a calculated risk, by definition.
I know the rules say you can fly VFR at night. In point of fact... if you can't see to land and/or can't make out the horizon, for all practical purposes, no you can't (and I won't be drawn into what the rules are in different jursidictions, my point remains valid). That isn't to say I haven't done it, I have, and plenty. I probably will avoid doing it again, though I'm aware not everyone has that luxury. Most machines with crap console lighting (but not all) are singles, or are older designs. I stand by my comments that you described as 'a load of rubbish'.
That said, some form of low-level directable lighting in the cockpit is a good thing, for finding a dropped pencil, reading that badly lit gauge, writing down a clearance, etc. There are a lot of choices out there, some would be great for me, but be rotten for you, and vice-versa depending upon what you fly, if you wear a helmet or a headset, if you're wearing NVGs or not, if you're working around cultural lighting or in the dark as the Maker intended. So, while a Mag-Lite might work for some in the cockpit, some would avoid it like the plague. Like most questions on this forum, nobody can really answer it but the question writer because nobody is doing exactly the same thing.