No that is fairly accurate.
Flying home at night over the desert, if there is no moon it is darker than you can possibly think. So dark that the NVG’s only make the ground a pitch black blob, with no stars, as opposed to the pitch black blob above you with no stars. It is literally darker than closing your eyes in a dark room.
It is very easy to get disoriented looking outside, because you have absolutely no references and you cannot trust any references you do see, because lights on the ground start to look like a horizon or stars and then your inner ear starts telling you things that aren’t true.
Night strafe is even worse, because you are going downhill in this aforementioned black hole and other than your symbology you have no idea at all where the ground is, and usually a pilot cannot see the target even with NVG’s, so they just strafe symbology.
The night is dark and full of terrors.
Also, the FLIR image on the HUD, in the strike eagle it is now rarely used, because the pilot is wearing NVG’s, and you can’t see the FLIR image clearly (or at all) through the NVG’s. We still turn it on, because it is great for the WSO in his HUD repeater.
Issues with it are alignment. the FLIR pod is offset from the HUD itself, so your image is also offset, and most of the time pilots don’t align it. You can have things being quite far off from your symbology (parallax errors) which can make things rather interesting (are we going to hit that aircraft that the FPM is on? or is it offset? Are we landing on the runway or 300 Meters to the left?) Combined with the lack of resolution in the HUD display, NVG’s are honestly superior.
The advantages of FLIR are that it sees on a different wavelength than NVG’s so if you combine the two you can get some interesting effects. Heat sources of course light up quite nicely in FLIR in a way they don’t in NVG’s, and they both can see through different types of clouds. Overall, for a pilot, once you have decent NVG’s the FLIR is not particularly useful except in some edge cases.
Doesn’t diminish the coolness factor of it though.