That's because modern airline trainers and managers will punish their pilots for breaching SOP by leaving the lights off.
"What's normal" shifts with time just like other human phenomenon. Originally from politics, the notion of the "
Overton Window" is a way of examining a range of ideas, (or processes, or procedures, etc.), that the public, (or perhaps any group in which standards guide behaviour) will accept. The notion of "range" encompasses the "heretical" (revolutionary) to the level of "policy", (old hat).
The notion of the Normalization of Deviance, first offered in Diane Vaughan's, "
", (1996) can be thought of as an objective metric in time as well as a description of human behaviour over time in terms of risk analysis and management.
Years ago flight directors were terrible, and on the DC8/DC9, manually set for pitch, mostly during takeoffs. They were reliable for ILS approaches, however. The habit of "looking through" them was borne from the sense that they really weren't telling you anything important. Today, they are fully integrated and display what the auto flight system is "thinking", so they have value, but both the raw data "in-behind", and an awareness of aircraft state, just as Centaurus emphasizes!