Unfortunately with my 6 inch Orion Andromeda is still not much more than a bright smudge in the sky...but yes you can see it with the naked eye, the trick is to not try and look directly at it, same as several objects that are visible but not if you look right at them.
You can also see the Hercules cluster that way on a good night.
I don’t worry about light pollution, and in my lifetime, here in the Boonies, the amount of artificial light has increased. Luckily, there hasn’t been any big drive to slap up bunch of suburban ranh-manses to the south of us, the town is small, there hasn’t been a big drive to put up street lights, and it still gets pretty dark. The amateur astronomers have their observatory over near Lowell, and last time I was there (open house I suspect it was) it was still really dark. Some of their members did a little PR work during ArtPrize 2013 (I didn’t end up going in 2014), and set up their personal scopes (including one of those giant Dobsonian reflectors) on the lawn of the Museum. Despite the city lights, whatever we were looking at (Saturn, for one thing, if memory serves) was visible.
If the choice is between having no nighttime lights versus inconveniencing astronomers, I’ll take the former; ground astronomy is a nice hobby (and it’s largely a subset of a photography hobby), but really big discoveries will continue to shift to off-world unmanned observatories, and ground-based observations using radioastronomy (for near-Earth objects, particularly on the Sun-side). :’)