Until very recently I worked in the FSD community, and I wouldn’t say I viewed it as a joke. I don’t know if I believed they would get to level 5 without any lidar, it’s pretty good for what’s available in the consumer market.
It's two steps from selling snake-oil, basically. Not that L4 or L5 are impossible, but people who knew the problem domain looked at how they were approaching it hardware-wise and went "... uhuh."