Karpathy said in some podcast that Tela uses LIDAR in training, and by doing this they can get a lot of the benefits. Not sure that all off the "worlds experts" agree with you that you HAVE to use LIDAR. Rate of progress for FSD has been very impressive lately. I personally think that its very plausible that Tesla might beat Waymo to large scale location independent autonomous driving.
Waymo's recent experiment with multimodal models and a purely camera based system (EMMA) validate some of the claims that using LIDAR data in training does help. Pretty neat! Still not as good as a LIDAR + RADAR based system.