Non-shit night vision, the kind where warm things glow at night, requires LWIR sensors that are at a temperature lower than the warm thing (otherwise the sensor itself glows).
NIR sensitivity does not improve night vision. That mostly requires a "tapetum lucidum" or reflective layer, more rods than cones (less helpful when you want to see colors in daylight) or just larger, more biologically expensive and vulnerable eyes than necessary.
Your comment and its grandparent are both excellent, but I would like to nitpick a bit here. Technically, NIR sensitivity does improve night vision through the simple mechanism of "detect more wavelengths = detect more total light". It's not thermal imaging, but it is the reason that CCTV cameras often mechanically move their IR filter out of the way when the light falls below some threshold - at that point, sensitivity is more important than color fidelity, so they accept all the light they can get, even nonvisible. Of course this is also often coupled with NIR illumination LEDs.
