I had to look this up, but you’re mostly right. They never really did use LiDAR. They did use other types of radar, which were removed or disabled. In any case, they (Elon) asserted that neither radar nor LiDAR was really necessary.
However, that was mostly a couple years ago. In the past month or two they actually have begun buying up tons of LiDAR.
Also, they were sued over FSD in court and their lawyers are now arguing that customers should’ve known that cars without LiDAR are not capable of reliable FSD.
Humans can drive just fine without lidar aswell. Road infrastructure is designed for vision. The car not being able to see is not the issue. It's teaching the car to understand what it sees and how to deal with it. Lidar doesn't help you solve this issue.
Unlike human eyes Tesla's inconveniently do not come with a supercomputer installed that is able to interpret the optical data reliably. With the compute power we have available Radar based navigation is the only one that produces reliably safe results.
It depends on your definition of "super computer", it used to be any computer with performance over 1 gigaflop, which today would probably include most smart phones and the built in car computer in the Tesla.
But regardless of semantics, I think your point holds, humans are a special case and computers can't do that yet.
Bro he was talking about your brain
And there is no supercomputer on earth able to even approach it, and regardless supercomputer is a rather relative term tbh