I work at a company that does lidar SLAM. You can actually produce really high quality maps/slam with lidar/tof sensors, and it’s a lot more robust/dense than visual/imu mapping.
Depends on what you’re comparing to what. Big spinning lidars on cars are still expensive (few thousand dollars) but are coming down on price. Handheld 3D scanners on the other hand might start to become obseleted by a combination of cheap phone camera + lidar (really tof) sensors that are evidently cheap enough to put on phones. They can actually produce really high quality (SLAM) maps - Apple has figured out that they can have a much faster initial mapping phase by not having to do monocular mapping for their AR. So I guess I’m saying it’s cheaper and a bit worse, but it’s rapidly getting better.