It is all downstream of the loss of the manufacturing industry in America. In the 50s you could entrust a random guy to build a liquid rocket engine in a dusty garage because he spent every day of his career building various pipes and combustion chambers. All of these guys are now dead or retired so when you try to build hardware today you get new grads who settle on LIDAR and computer vision not because it is the best choice but because it is literally all that they are familiar with; the old solutions have all ceased to exist within the minds of employees and classrooms.