Despite Elon's commentary, the reason Tesla does not use lidar is sensor cost (waymo/cruise cars probably have 250k+ worth of sensors on them), and reason Tesla does not use radar is supply chain.
Tesla put constrain on themselves, because they wanted to sell product years before they existed, and they were super cheap on HW, to optimize their costs.
They optimized their solution, before they even had a slightest idea what's needed to make it work.
all that said, I'm still pessimistic about tesla's chances at making camera-only L4 work in any short time horizon. we will see if they pull it off, but it's such a severe disadvantage compared to fully-kitted competitors.
They are also ahead of every other auto maker in commercially purchasable L2 autopilot.
With that context, it doesn't make sense to add $50k+ to the price of their cars (e.g. doubling the cost of a Model Y) just to get slightly better autopilot performance. Lidar would help them in some cases (e.g. stationary objects), but it's not a panacea. Their strategy makes perfect sense given they want to sell semi-affordable cars to the public.
On the flipside, Cruise & Waymo's strategy of "geofenced L4 at any initial cost" makes perfect sense for their short term robotaxi ambitions.
Maybe in ~10 years these strategies will intersect, but for the time being they are completely different products.
Numbers came out a few days ago showing that Teslas had some of the highest margins in the mainstream auto segment.