I would bet it's more he cares way less about tesla now that the hard stuff is done and the huge factories are designed and spitting out vehicles. He's moved on to spacex and that brain implant place, where there's still plenty of really hard engineering going on. I don't think it's fair to say any era of Elon would be ashamed of taking money from people either. he's always like money and has had no problem shipping crap as the v1 of something, to be improved later.
most importantly, self driving is not done and in Elons own words its what makes the company worth billions or next to nothing. Just because Elon says hes an engineer doesnt mean its true.
I'd agree with this take. Elon through 3/Y was relative market/product aligned. Cybertruck, FSD failures, and yoke/no-stalks are perversions of the "thinking freely" product patterns he had before.