They are behind Waymo but they are getting there. They started giving fully autonomous drives since last month without safety driver in Austin. Tesla chose a harder camera-only approach but it's more scalable once it works.
They'll probably get there faster too because the decisions the camera+lidar model makes can be used to automatically evaluate the camera-only model.
It's cheaper, that's all it is.
Scalability is usually about O(n²) vs O(n log n) or something, not a smaller constant that's significant but not a game changer.