You remember incorrectly. Tesla have never used LIDAR except for training on specific developer cars. Elon has said from day one LIDAR is an expensive waste because of the compute requirements and latency. They did remove the parking ultrasonic sensors, which at one point were used as a close proximity, low speed auxiliary data source in FSD.

The mandate of FSD has always been that humans get away with driving using only their vision so it must be possible for a computer to do the same. If you have used FSD lately it's largely there.