What I have met, the interior lights just had their own switches, separate one for the front one or two and then one for the rest. So it was mostly up to the driver, how he operated these lights.
I was keeping them ON within the city area, where the sops were frequent and passengers were shuffling all the time, when there was sufficient road lights, I even left the front ones on. But when departing to the outer stretch of the lines, where there was longer drive between stops, I turned them OFF about a minute after departing the stop and ON again about a minute before arriving to the next one, to allow passengers to get seated or ready to leave. The front ones I then turned on only when at the stop and only if someone was using the front door (the busses had at least 3 or 5 doors, the front ones had quite narrow corridor around the driver cab, so people tend to not use them that much).