"Solving vision" is a 10x more harder problem than building a practical self-driving car with LIDAR. We might get it working with LIDAR in 2-5 years, but without LIDAR in 20-50 years.
Arguably Alphabet (Google + Waymo + Deepmind + co) is the largest group of AI and ML experts in the world. If someone is going to figure out general computer vision, then it's likely to be them - and if they are working on LIDAR first then there must be a good reason why.
I believe Tesla is promoting LIDAR-less systems just because it's expensive bulky hardware, and they can't possibly sell cars with it at a reasonable cost. Calling cameras and radars "full self-driving hardware" is a good marketing tactic, but without any guarantees that they can build the software for it in the next 20 years.