This is a poor comparison. The contrast of a cars to the background of Earth is low, ofcourse we can not see any. Remove Earth and let these cars fly on orbits 500km below ISS and, oh boy, would you suddenly see car roofs and windows glinting in the dark everywhere.

Amazing for satellite watchers and annoying for astronomers were e.g. Iridium flares. See [0][1]. Worst case for Iridium flares was them being about 50x as bright as planet Venus. Starlink satellites have the advantage of orbiting far lower which puts them into Earth's shadow on part of their orbits. Around midsummer, though, satellites in an orbit at 550km, like Starlink's lowest shells, will be lit by sunlight as soon as they cross northwards over ~ 45° latitude (their orbits have an inclination of 53°, so they definitely do this). I'm going out on a limb here but they might interfere with infrared observations because of emitted heat (being exposed to bright sunlight every half orbit heats them up).

Parent poster was most likely also referring to the Kessler Syndrome [2] when talking about safety.

[0] https://youtu.be/MTGVuPr9Epg?t=100

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare#Iridium_flares

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome