drivers NOT turning there lights on is SO BAD here in Canada that our transport safety board has mandated IF the interior cluster lights turn on the headlights MUST turn on automatically when dark
so every NEW car can NOT do the no headlights when dark -
not 100% on how it is written but MACK trucks have the tail lights on with the DRLs now and that fulfills the requirement
My Volvo has incandescent lights and they are the BEST set of headlights on ANY car I have owned including HID lights on a Lexus so it is possible to make incandescent lights WORK VERY WELL if they want

 They need to do that here ! 

Those flickering LED brake lights are especially rough to be around.

I agree those are awful!

  The flickery LED headlights are a common occurence on cars with daytime running lights.  It's caused by the vehicles electrical system as most of the factory DRL systems do not always run at full voltage .

Thinking about it, I've only seen headlight flicker in daytime, so it probably is a DRL thing

----------
If they want to do things the cheap way (pulsing as opposed to actually lowering the voltage) they could atleast do it at a higher frequency where it wouldn't be noticeable (60hz or whatever they use is a bad choice .lol. )

living in a country that has mandated DRL's since the 90s
the only time you see flickering HEADLIGHTS are people that have installed aftermarket LEDs in cars with dimmed headlights for DRL as incandescent is fine with a LOW switching speed that make LED noticeably flicker
and to run faster wold be pointless and more costly on the switching components in the lighting module 

 If the owner of the vehicle in question was to simply buy the needed modules when he/she bought the lamps the flicker wouldn't be an issue . From what I've read , the module simply installs in line between the LED and the factory harness . No cutting or other mods nessesary .

I've never really had much of an issue with most car brake lights being too bright, except for some modern cars with integrated LED brake lights that are almost blinding at night, but even older cars with LED brake light bulbs in incandescent housings aren't too bad from what I've seen.

Now HID and LED headlamps are another story, as I've seen aftermarket HID/LED headlight bulbs that do a good job with beam control, and others that don't. My father's 2011 Honda Odyssey has aftermarket HID kits fitted in its headlights, and the beam control of them is pretty good (wouldn't have accepted otherwise), but I've also seen some that were pretty bad, as in, might as well tape a couple of floodlamps to the hood of the car bad.

One thing I've noticed out here at least (which I'm not sure is the case anywhere else) is that most of the major intersections seem to be slightly raised, which can be an issue with cars that even have properly aimed headlamps, since the beam cutoff has to be parallel to the ground, which is fine on a level surface, but can be an issue when you're coming over a slope with oncoming traffic.

often those modules are plug and play and take full 12V power from the battery and use the cars headlight wiring as a "trigger" and in some instances you will end up with FULL brightness high beams on all the time blinding oncoming traffic

 All of the ones I've seen contain either a resistor or a capacitor or 2 inside .

 https://www.auxito.com/products/9007-led-canbus-decoder-hb5-anti-flicker-harness-bulbs-decoder-error-free