It's not intentionally limiting to match humans - it's recognizing that you need extremely high quality interpretation of visual data in order to achieve level 5 and if you have that then you don't need lidar because it has become redundant.
If you believe this argument to be true, then investment in lidar is a waste of time at best and at worst it's a distraction from getting the visual interpretation where it needs to be. Arguably companies that focus on it could be 'doomed' because of the investment cost/wrong focus, I think that's what they were getting at.
The dense fog is a good counter example - does lidar help in fog? I'd wonder if it would reflect off the fog?
Once you've got the visual part working at human level then adding additional lidar probably doesn't hurt (assuming you can get the costs down).