[bradstewart]

It's all trade offs. I'm just spitballing here, but if you have limited resources, you can either spend cash/time on lidar or invest in higher-quality mass-produced optics, or better computer vision software. If you get to a functional camera-only system sooner, might everyone be better off as you can deploy it more rapidly.

Manufacturing capacity of lidar components might be limited.

Another might be reliability/failure modes. If the system relies on lidar, that's another component that can break (or brownout and produce unreliable inputs).

So in a vaccum, yea a lidar+camera system is probably better, but who knows with real life trade offs.

(again, I just made these up, I do not work on this stuff, but these are a few scenarios I can imagine)