considering cameras can create reliable enough distance measurements AND also handle all the color reception needed for legally driving roads it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain set of people that lidar is necessary.

No, cameras cannot create reliable distance measurements in real-world conditions. Parallax is not a great way to measure distance for fast, unpredictably moving objects (such as cars on the road). And dirt or misalignment can significantly reduce accuracy compared to lab conditions.

Note that humans do not rely strictly on our eyes as cameras to measure distances. There is a huge amount of inference about the world based on our internal world models that goes into vision. For example, if you put is in a false-perspective or otherwise highly artifical environment, our visual acuity goes down significantly; conversely, people with a single eye (so no parallax-based measurement ability) still have quite decent depth perception compared to what you'd naively expect. Not to mention, our eyes are kept very clean, and maintain their alignment to a very high degree of precision.

Stereo cameras are useless against repeating patterns. They easily match neighboring copies. And there are lots of repeating or repeating-like patterns that computers aren't smart enough to handle.

You can solve this by adding an emitter next to the camera that does something useful, be it just beaconing lights or noise patterns or phase synced laser pulses. And those "active cameras" are what everyone call LIDARs.

There are tons of evidence showing that cameras are alone are not safe enough and even Tesla has realized that removing lidar to save cost was a mistake.