Whats up with our stick shift knobs ?

I agree - I insisted all my children (quite a while ago) learned to drive a Manual and had a Manual as their first cars - it forces them to engage better with the machine. Harder now - so many cars not even sold as Manual.

 

Well as I responded to Tideland...
I don't own a Gen 4 Prius, so maybe not the best person to answer about the specifics of the light.

I would suggest that even though you say you have never bought a vehicle based on safety features, the evolution of the automobile means you have benefited from them anyway.
My lifetime kind of bridges a long evolution of safety features and change. Things we now take for granted like shoulder belt seatbelts, uni-body crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, and yes, padded dash's, not to mention airbags. Other things I've failed to mention.
Decade by decade, step by step, vehicles have adopted better and improving safety features and technology.
I'm being sarcastic in my original post, but the truth is we did live in a time where vehicles had only lap belts, priority was looks, or comfort, or driving feel and performance and very little was invested into making vehicles safer to operate.

I probably have never made "safety features" the PRIMARY reason I have bought a particular vehicle. But I always check crash test results, and safety ratings. It is something I always evaluate.
I think todays available high tech safety features are amazing.

Hypocritically, when I was young, and could really afford only the most inexpensive "new" vehicle, I bought a stripped down small Nissan Pick-Up. Early 90's.
Ladder frame. Bench Seats-which you would slide around in, No air bag, no anti-lock brakes and the crash test results were actually very bad.
I bought it, and loved it anyway, shielded by the ignorance and arrogance of youth. I believed I couldn't be hurt.
As much as I did love those 2 trucks I ended up owning?
I would never today want to own a vehicle with such a lack of actual safety features.
I consider it lucky, that I never got in a major accident while driving those vehicles.
We've come a long way in what is available and even baseline expected as far as safety features in a vehicle. This reality does I think often save ourselves from ourselves.

 

And what about the "... "Apparatus for Cleaning Carriage, Motor Car and other Windows" which was stated to use either brushes or wipers and could be either motor driven or hand driven. The brushes or wipers were intended to clean either both up and down ..." in 1903.

[ today's wipers are more like WIKI says "... the Tri-Continental Corporation in 1917. This company introduced the first windscreen wiper, Rain Rubber, for the slotted, two-piece windscreens found on many of the automobiles of the time. Today Trico Products is one of the world's largest manufacturers of windscreen wipers. Bosch has the world's biggest windscreen wiper factory in Tienen, Belgium, which produces 350,000 wiper blades every day. The first automatic electric wiper arms were patented in 1917 by Charlotte Bridgwood. ..." ]

I really like my windscreen wipers. I remember the '40s, '50s and '60s when most Aussie cars didn't have heaters or demisters. Nor radios.

 

As you can see from the two attached photos, the tiny overhead lamp in my 2019 Prius XLE is aimed straight down and projects about two feet so that it casts it's light in a wide area including over the shift lever.

My 2014 Accord Hybrid had a small blue lamp casting a similar glow downward.

 

Yup, that's exactly the same as our UK right hand drive overhead console.