I suspect it helps engineering the system. If you have 30 difference sensors, how do you design a system that accounts for seemingly random combinations of them disagreeing with an observation in real time if a priori you don’t know the weight of their observation in that particular situation? For humans for example you know that in most cases seeing something in a car is more important than smelling something. But what if one of your eyes sees a pedestrian and another sees a shadow of a bird?

Also don’t forget that as a human you can move your head any which way, and also draw on your past experiences driving in that area. “There is always an old man crossing the road at this intersection. There is a school nearby so there might be kids here at 3pm.” That stuff is not as accessible to a LIDAR.