I already explained this. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and by focusing on LIDAR (the cost of LIDAR itself, spending valuable onboard compute on processing and fusing LIDAR data, etc) you are by necessity leaving fewer resources for your vision system. This matters a lot if there are situations where you effectively can't rely on the LIDAR at all, which actually seems to happen a lot in a driving context, assuming you want your vision to work on all roads at all times (that a human could drive).
So yes, if you have infinite resources you should obviously use LIDAR. But we don't so its not nearly as clear.
Yes, I have been making that point for the entirety of this conversation.
1. Tesla needs to figure out how to achieve performance of their system without LIDAR. However since humans do so with two eyes, there is strong precedent that this is possible.
2. Waymo needs to figure out how to self-drive in situations when LIDAR cannot be relied upon. If they cannot do this, their system will never achieve Level 5 (but that's OK! Level 4 taxi service seems like a good business). If they can do this, then it is not clear they ever needed LIDAR in the first place.
So yes, if you have infinite resources you should obviously use LIDAR. But we don't so its not nearly as clear.