Tesla is such a politically-charged brand at this point that none of these discussions are in good faith. It's all fanboys vs haters.

The lidar vs cameras arguments are good example of this. This is a technical engineering question that could go either way - maybe cameras are good enough, maybe you need lidar, nobody on the internet is really in a position to judge.

But Tesla did it with cameras, and everybody else is doing it with lidar. Therefore to Elon fanboys that's the smart way to do it; and to Elon haters that's the stupidest possible way to do it. And they'll make it part of their political identity and spend thousands of pages arguing about it.