I can really only speak from my own experience, but when I have a customer who wants to be able to identify people in a restaurant, glowing eyes don't help matters. Overexposure isn't so much a problem as UNEVEN exposure. The 3MP Dahua dome we put in a site recently (on a 12' high vaulted ceiling) ended up with a speaker array mounted right under it - if the IR is enabled, the array is brightly lit up and everything else in the FOV is dark - "intelligent" IR is of zero use in a situation like that.
I think, too, that a lot of people find it creepy to look up and see those faintly glowing LEDs staring back at them - at least, the people running these particular restaurants do, and they don't want to "annoy" customers with that.
I've used some Raytec IR illuminators for a parking lot that didn't have a lot of ambient light... they helped a bit, closer in, but didn't provide nearly as good of OVERALL illumination as the HPS lights mounted at about the same level on the wall.
On the whole, I just haven't seen an setup where IR works all that well. If someone asks me about cameras for watching their yard or something, I tend to suggest a good D/N camera and some motion-activated halogen flood rather than IR cameras - not only do you get color images without the glowing eyes, but a bright light snapping on is more likely to be a deterrent to someone creeping around... plus the initial instinct is to look toward the source of the light, meaning if the camera is mounted nearby, you get a great face shot.