If one believes that autonomous cars with no limitations on environment will never exist, then no progress will get us any closer to infinity.

If you think geofencing scales to solve the FSD problem. Otherwise no.

sure, “no closer” is hyperbole and in the most literal sense of the phrase, we are closer because time has passed… but in the practical sense, we are closer today because testing is going well and so permission has been granted to expand testing — the technology is not meaningfully different, what’s happening today could have happened 5 years ago (if safety regulations were more lax and had permitted testing with less data).

So what have the engineers working on this been up to for the last 5 years? Nothing?

There's "asking clarify questions", then there's "intentionally missing the point to be argumentative".