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Off-topic halachic minutia:
It sounds to me like your camp counselor was ignorant of the actual halachah, but had some vague of how the relevant halachot worked and tried to construct his own rational for them. A glow stick does not produce significant quantities of heat, so a glowstick is probably at most Rabbinically prohibited. This means that arguably the consequences of what one does after having such an object activated may be less severe than if it were say a candle. In particular, one is in general prohibited on the Sabbath from benefiting from actions which one knew were violations of the Sabbath, but that might not apply since a glowstick is at most Rabbinically prohibited, and likely not even then. However, a candle is classified as "muktzah", a complicated status that roughly means that even if it had been lit before Sabbath, it cannot be moved, and arguably that would apply to a glowstick. However, once one has picked up a muktzah object (whether on purpose or by accident), one may generally move it around until one puts it down.
Out of curiosity, do people who grow up under this sort of regime end up thinking it's normal, similarly to the way people raised in Christianity end up desensitized to the absurd-sounding nature of the beliefs about virgin birth and so on? Does it cause them to e.g. be more accepting of government regulation than average? Or is there some kind of compartmentalization going on where they continue expecting rules in general to make some sort of sense (and not interfere with practical functioning), just not those labeled "religious"?
My suspicion, of course, is the latter (just as people compartmentalize their epistemic beliefs, and allow their absurdity heuristic to function more-or-less normally outside of the religious domain), but I'd be curious to hear reflections from those who were raised in strict legalistic religions about the extent to which such practices actually struck them as absurd inside their own minds (even allowing for belief in the empirical claims of the religion about the nature of the universe).
I can't speak for anyone else, but I was raised an Orthodox Jew and I basically took to treating it as "normal" in the same sense that any set of arbitrary social rules is "normal." It was no weirder than the rules governing, say, when it was OK to wear a T-shirt and sneakers vs. when it wasn't, or when it was OK to eat the last piece of cake, or whatever.
And I still basically think that. It's not that there's some default state where there aren't any arbitrary rules to follow, against which I can compare the rules of Orthodox Judaism. There are just different cultures, each with its own set of rules.
I suspect that, again as with any set of social norms, the key distinction is between people who are raised with only one such set of norms, compared to people who are raised having to navigate among several. The former group can treat their culture's rules as invisible and default and "common sensical"; the latter group can't get away with that so easily.