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In the long term maybe he has a point. In the short term the other guys are often using a radar built in 1985 and displaying to a ray tube.
But also, how far can low light sensitive cameras see into the sky? Maybe a couple miles with some sort of telescopic optics? The F35 can attack from beyond visual range using its 100 mile range radar system.
How big of an area of the sky is that going to cover? And clouds?
Sky coverage is just a matter of replicating one telephoto unit a couple hundred times or whatever to cover the horizon. Clouds are a game-breaker in the optical frequencies - when they're there.
Up to the horizon (and actually slightly past due to lensing). The setting sun is a perfect example. Sure, it's brighter than a single fighter aircraft, but as long as you have double digit individual photons to work with the game hasn't changed theoretically, and light collection technology is right around perfect at this point.
Continuous cloud cover messes up that calculation pretty good, though. If this kind of system was seriously deployed today we might see pre-WWII tactics and strategies coming back to exploit that. In practice, sensor fusion in all kinds of bands is the name of the game, and what will probably make stealth aircraft obsolete eventually.
Sensor fusion is another F-35 feature. Elon seems to think visible spectrum cameras are all you need. Even if you could capture a couple dozen photos reflected off a fighter jet from miles away, how could you reasonably know it's speed, distance, and location like you get with radar?
Yeah, while we are at it. Everything sucks compared to the starship enterprise. You can't beat photon torpedoes and shields. All current military technology sucks.
Elon Musk's next idea is to just power everything with fusion. It's easy! There's deuterium everywhere!