Twenty or thirty stars in a city centre, over two thousand in the countryside. The Bortle scale grades night skies from 1 to 9.
Streetlights and signs scatter off particles in the air, brightening the whole sky. Any star fainter than that background simply disappears.
Class 1 is a perfect dark sky where the Milky Way casts shadows. A city centre is class 8 or 9, leaving twenty or thirty bright stars.
Under a class 3 rural sky you can count over two thousand stars unaided, with the Milky Way clearly visible.
Step outside from a lit room and you see almost nothing. Full dark adaptation takes 20–30 minutes — and one glance at a phone screen resets it.