YES!
I mean, if you never shoot at night in any way, may not matter. But even a bad flash hider with bad ammo (there is flash suppressant in much defensive / all-mil ammo) will give you little jets of fire instead of a soccer-ball-sized ball of fire.
From another forum, I wrote up this a while back in answer to a not-dissimilar question:
Long, long ago, when no one brought an RDS'd gun to class, the instructor had a little experiment at the end of the night shooting time, and we each, in turn, fired our guns while the others watched, to see how various muzzle devices worked. It was even ban period, so we had weird devices and bare muzzles.
Discounting the commercial spec ammo fireballs (we did some ammo trading to get solid results) almost all worked
fine. The three prong early AR, and the later AR18 one, both worked as well as the A2 flash hider. Same for similar designs in other guns like the G3 birdcage looking thing. The worst most did, like some Smith brakes and I think the Daewoo, were tiny, tiny cartoonish licks of flame out the ports. So small, we were all pretty sure they wouldn't give you away to downrange bad guys in real life unless very unlucky and fighting in caves, or something.*
Older designs, like the M14, were pretty mediocre. Okay for not blinding the shooter, but some visible flame.
Even with good, flash suppressing powder, mil-acquired ammo, bare muzzles still have a fireball. Commercial ammo is a soccer ball. Carbines are a softball, rifles (20" 5.56 I mean now) baseball sized or a bit smaller. So, the flash hider IS doing a lot of work here.
I am totally happy with my YHM-5M2-QD. Seems to have had no impact on accuracy, side vents only so no dust kicking up, or distorted view, and zero flash on the darkest night. Others are similar like the SF brakes
here or
here, I am told. But... your friends may hate you if on line at the range. Get a blast can.
I have not seen them much in person, but the current crop of
SF flash hiders (or something different
here to be confusing) seem very nice. Some people running them on precision rifles. 800 yard precision rifles.
And for real flash suppression... get a suppressor