Its irrelevant. A robot is a robot.

Dictionary def: "a machine controlled by a computer that is used to perform jobs automatically."

No one is denying that robots existed already (but I would hardly call a dishwasher a robot FWIW)

But in my mind a waymo was always a "car with sensors", but more recently (especially having recently used them a bunch in California recently) I've come to think of them truly as robots.

A robot is a robot, and a human is a creature that won't necessarily agree with another human on what the definition of a word is. Dictionaries are also written by humans and don't necessarily reflect the current consensus, especially on terms where people's understanding might evolve over time as technology changes.

Even if that definition were universally agreed on l upon though, that's not really enough to understand what the parent comment was saying. Being a robot "in the same way" as something else is even less objective. Humans are humans, but they're also mammals; is a human a mammal "in the same way" as a mouse? Most humans probably have a very different view of the world than most mice, and the parent comment was specifically addressing the question of whether it makes sense for an autonomous car to model the world the same way as other robots or not. I don't see how you can dismiss this as "irrelevant" because both humans and mice are mammals (or even animals; there's no shortage of classifications out there) unless you're completely having a different conversation than the person you responded to. You're not necessarily wrong because of that, but you're making a pretty significant misjudgment if you think that's helpful to them or to anyone else involved in the ongoing conversation.

TIL fuel injectors are robots. Probably my ceiling lights too.

Maybe we need to nitpick about what a job is exactly? Or we could agree to call Waymos (semi)autonomous robots?

In the same way people online have argued helicopters are flying cars, it doesn't capture what most people mean when they use the word "robot", anymore than helicopters are what people have in mind when they mention flying cars.