That’s the thing, they’re already merging multiple data streams (cameras) and dealing with visual anomalies. Pretty nonsense they can’t figure out different sensors when other companies are doing it just fine.

I remember this being his reasoning for it, that the lidar should be unnecessary if they could get multi-camera depth perception to work like it does in humans.

But it won't with current camera technology. The mix of high acuity at the center, moveable camera, wide peripheral vision, object tracking and non-frame-based sensing that allows human eyes to sense the depth of moving objects in low light is not commercially available with camera systems under ~10000$. It's cheaper to install LIDAR than to install cameras which are uniformly as good as the human eye. To get the acuity of a human eye at the center you'd need ~400MPx, or have a gimbaled camera to point towards an object of interest, and tracking small fast objects with such a camera (and at night!) is very very expensive in hardware.