You don't get a $700B market cap by telling investors "We don't know."
So the gradual rollout strategy is actually great.
Tesla wants to do "all or nothing", and ends up with nothing for now (example with Europe, where FSD is sold since 2016 but it is "pending regulatory approval", when actually, the problem is the tech that is not finished yet, sadly).
It's genuinely a difficult problem to solve, so it's better to do it step-by-step than a "big-bang deploy".
It seemed like most players in tech a few years ago were using legal shenanigans to dodge liability here, which, to me, indicates a lack of seriousness toward the safety implications.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't care if they called it "Penis Enlarger 9000" if it drove me around like it now does.
I think you misunderstood, or it's a terminology problem.
Waymo's point in the video is that in contrast to Tesla, they are _not_ doing gradual rollout of seemingly-working-still-often-catastropically-failing tech.
See e.g. minute 5:33 -> 6:06. They are stating that they are targeting directly the shown upper curve of safety, and that they are not aiming for the "good enough that the average user will stop paying attention, but not actually good enough to be left alone".
Since they targeted very low risk, they did a geographically-segmented rollout, starting with Phoenix, which is one of the easiest places to drive: a lot of photons for visibility, very little rain, wide roads.