Until very recently I worked in the FSD community, and I wouldn’t say I viewed it as a joke. I don’t know if I believed they would get to level 5 without any lidar, it’s pretty good for what’s available in the consumer market.

That's what I mean. Nobody I know thought there'd be a chance of getting to L4 (much less L5) without LIDAR. They doomed the goal from the gate and basically lied to people for years about the technological possibilities to pad their bottom line.

It's two steps from selling snake-oil, basically. Not that L4 or L5 are impossible, but people who knew the problem domain looked at how they were approaching it hardware-wise and went "... uhuh."