If camera based self driving doesn't happen at first, it never will later.

That's because it would be a safety downgrade, and the public never accepts new technology which does the same as a previous one, yet drops a safety feature.

For example, requiring a handbrake separate from the main brakes in cars. There hasn't been an engineering reason to keep these separate for 50 years, the main brakes already are doubly redundant. But people won't adjust laws to reduce safety, even if the safety reduction is so vanishingly small so as to not matter.

The issue with vision only, especially without IR is that even if it becomes safer than a human, it won't ever have the awareness of vision+IR/Lidar, thus be less safe.