No it's not. I've had kind-of-that "smart switches" in the office. To turn on the light the appropriate button is to be pressed (among 20, it's kind-of a control panel). Once the light is turned on, the red LED is turned on at the edge of the button. So it fits the proposed "turn the LED on when the light is on."
The problem: in the evening it gets dark, you want to turn on the light and come to the dark corner with the panel where the 20 buttons are, and you have no idea which of 20 will turn on the damn light (to add the insult to the injury, it's some in the middle of course, these in the corners are something whatever). And as the punishment, if you hit the wrong buttons you will raise or lower the blinds or change the heating or turn on the fans in the ceiling.
I ask these who installed the system: can you make it having the LED by the button on when the light is off (invert the logic).
"Can't do, the whole module (20 buttons and the LCD display) is made in the factory and can't be tweaked."
A "smart" control panel from hell.
My other favorite comparable bad button is one actual button on the remote controller for one TV-on-computer device. It was probably some generic remote customized by the company for that device. The problem: one button, easy to hit, just blocks the whole device and leaves the software running in the background. Of course, it can't be reprogrammed.
We had something even more frustrating: no switches. Just motion detectors and a web portal. You could only control on/off and brightness through a website if you memorized the room's 16-bit hex code, and you'd only be entrusted with that if you were one of those chosen by management to be a light keeper.
If the light server crashes and the lights reset to maximum brightness while you're the only one in the office... I hope you brought your sunglasses because they're staying like that until morning.
That's not a problem with the basic stateless-switch-with-LED concept; it's a problem with somebody putting together 20 buttons and expecting that to be usable in the dark. It would be no more usable if it was 20 unlit toggle switches in the dark.
To turn on the light, you need something emitting a bit of light when it's dark, not when everything is visible. The major problem with most of the designs are too bright LEDs. They could actually be made to shine so little to be only recognizable in the dark.
That's just bad layout. They should put the switch to control the nearest light on the far left or right. That way you can always turn on the light by the door and control panel in the dark.
It's still sort of a solution to an invented problem, but you could have them wire in a small motion light. Or one of those battery powered stick on LEDs.
I think my solution would be a piece of tape at the top of the control panel, indicating "light switch is directly below". Or possibly replacing the damn thing with normal controls, which I have yet to find inadequate.
The "damn thing" is a "smart" as it controls the light over the network cable -- there aren't even "normal" cables there with which the "normal" light switch would be possible to be installed.
