Quite a few mistakes to unpick here.
When you say IR illuminator, you actually mean IR lasers. IR illustrators are basically high powered IR flashlights and can be laser based, but are more commonly LEDs. They can be very useful in very niche scenarios, such as punching through a photonic barrier like a street light between you and your target that would effectively obscure your target otherwise, and brightening the background to reduce the size of your aiming IR laser through your NODs (see video below for demonstrations). But you won’t need IR illuminators with even Gen2+ NODs unless you are literally fighting in an environment with zero ambient light.
IR lasers are primarily used for CQB engagements of less than 200m for quick reaction times. Beyond that range, your IR laser would bloom to such a huge size you are basically just doing suppression fire, especially without IR illuminator compensation as most IR illuminators won’t have the range to do anything beyond 100m (which is where laser based IR illuminators come into their own). Most military IR lasers and IR illuminators comes packaged in a single combined unit, but they can be sold and used separately.
Most red dot sights have night vision modes to allow you to do passive aiming with NODs, but most such setups are sub optimal to be honest, and you will struggle to accurately hit human sized targets beyond 150m, and you really need dual tube night vision and risers on your red dot to use it properly. Good for dedicated night fighting setups, but sub-optimal for general purposes rifle setup, and dual tuned NODs are obviously more expensive than single tubed.
Below is a good video to give you an idea of what night shooting looks like with lasers, illuminators and red dots.
All of the above applies mainly to how western militaries do night fighting.
I actually think China is way ahead of the game when it comes to night fighting against peer and near-peer opponents.
Unlike western militaries that prefer high end IIT NODs army wide with IR laser-illuminators and/or red dots for aiming; China has gone the route of issuing cheap digital NODs to most troopers for
night time navigation (why PLA soldiers jokingly call their digital units night time walking aids), with a few scouts per squad getting proper dedicated IIT NODs and thermals for better long ranged situational awareness and IIT and Thermal rifle scopes for their troops for actual aiming. You have worse general situational awareness just due to having fewer high end NODs for all round observation per squad, but far superior engagement range and aim once engaged.
You can also massively change that equation with thermals. Chinese thermal vision tech is right up there with the best the west has to offer. If you dual mount even a cheap gen2+ IIT NOD with a high end thermal, you have way better situational awareness than the best gen3+ IIT dual tube NODs (this is why combined IIT and thermal units are the future of night vision).
IITs are not magic, they just allow you to see almost as good in night as day, but if something is well camouflaged, you will have just as hard a time spotting it with NODs as you would during the day with your MK1 eyeball. It’s just most wildlife move around at night whereas they would stay still during the day, so that makes it much easier to spot them, but people are not so stupid. Thermals are ‘magic’ in that the best camouflage and fieldcraft won’t do you much good against thermals. So, throw in some helmet mounted thermals and your typical squad using mostly cheap digital night vision plus dedicated night scopes will have far superior situational awareness and combat effectiveness as an enemy squad all with the very best IIT dual tubes and IR lasers while coming in at the same if not lower cost overall.
Now, you might have some zero creep from uninstalling and reinstalling the night scope, but while you won’t be winning any shooting competitions due to this, it should still be perfectly useable for combat (the whole point of pict rail and QD mounts after all), and almost certainly more precise and longer ranged than either IR laser or red dot aiming.
Another problem with IR laser aiming is that it can get very distracting, even overwhelming, if you got dozens or even hundred of guys all waving their IR lasers around.
