Bright light and light diffusion

Human vision is usually at its best when looking in bright daylight due to
the great amount of light and small pupil size, which means less corneal
aberration (and also good depth of field). However, highly bright objects
like the sun (or a reflection of the sun on a car for example) get a large
glare and diffusion around them.

What is the exact explanation: Why do the image areas with lower light level
not appear diffused at all, while bright objects are totally diffused? Note
that I'm not talking about the starburst effect caused by squinting the eye
(where the tear film has very elevated edges). So the eyes are kept wide
open.

http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color1.html#weberfechner
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color1.html#luminsensn

As it is explained in the above links (in Response Compression and
Luminosity Discrimination parts), image areas with high brightness will seem
somewhat equally bright even if they have slight brightness variation, in
other words, very big brightness difference is needed for the difference to
be detected when high brightness is in case.

Is this the explanation to my question or is there something else?

Is it correct to say, that if one sees halos and starburst around bright
objects, the same halo and starburst pattern are there around all objects
(except black objects) but they are just not detected around dim objects due
to this Weber-Fechner law?

ps. A similar thing of course happens with camera optics, where in the
result image the sun is highly diffused while the rest of the picture is
flawless (the amount of main starburst rays is defined by the polygon
aperture and the rest of the diffusion is caused by the reflections between
each optical element and other miscellaneous aberration).