I’ll bet you’re right that it’s the lights, but I don’t know about “overload” of anything.
The problem with camera vision (vs human vision or LiDAR) is poor definition range. This means that pointing a light at it, like happens with emergency vehicle lights, can cause it to dim the whole image to compensate and then not see the vehicles. Same thing as when you take a backlit photo and can’t see the people.
Was there a process in place to prevent the deployment that caused this?
No: blame the higher up
Yes: blame the dev that didn’t follow process
Of course there are other intricacies, like if they did follow a process and perform testing, and this still occurred, but in general…