In general I think you’re right about the tech just being shitty, but a slight correction: LiDAR was not developed for self-driving, it’s just a relevant application of the technology. LiDAR has been around for quite a while, and was initially best known as a remote sensing technology. It is effective at remote sensing because it can penetrate certain solid materials, most importantly foliage. So when an aerial LiDAR dataset is collected for a forested area, since the light can penetrate through most of the foliage, one can essentially ‘delete’ the vegetation from the resulting point cloud, leaving a bare earth model, which is a very close approximation of the landscape’s actual topography if there had been no trees. This can be especially valuable for archaeological research, as foliage is often a significant obstacle for accurately mapping large sites, or even finding them in the first place.

All of that to say, yeah, self-driving buzz made LiDAR well known as tech, but it wasn’t developed for that purpose.