It was not sarcastic. I'm not really sure what you're arguing. It's obvious that vision-only would be more advanced than using lidars. Lidars are expensive and take space, so that's why they're trying to use cameras only.
Having multiple orthogonal subsets of the electromagnetic spectrum at your disposal provides redundancy and diversity - two features that simply CANNOT be accommodated with a single class of sensor, not matter how advanced it may be.