> but intuitively it would seem a bit weird to me if they just happened to be restricted to exactly the same part of the spectrum as our eyes as a hardware limitation
being restricted to ~visible spectrum is a design goal for a camera, since we expect it to produce images that look like what we see. Your usual camera sensor will see a bit further into infrared than humans do (hence why cameras usually contain a filter filtering that out), but not so far that it is in any way useful for things that aren't burning hot. E.g. with cheap digital cameras with bad filters you might see the coals of campfire being slightly tinted wrong, because those get hot enough to be visible, but everything else is not affected, and you'd think a camera was bad if it were
being restricted to ~visible spectrum is a design goal for a camera, since we expect it to produce images that look like what we see. Your usual camera sensor will see a bit further into infrared than humans do (hence why cameras usually contain a filter filtering that out), but not so far that it is in any way useful for things that aren't burning hot. E.g. with cheap digital cameras with bad filters you might see the coals of campfire being slightly tinted wrong, because those get hot enough to be visible, but everything else is not affected, and you'd think a camera was bad if it were