This is the part I don't fully trust. The man has single-handedly managed to hype FSD for Tesla for years now without really being able to deliver anything all that meaningful, while charging consumers $5k-$10k and hasn't faced any real repurcussions for these shenanigans. Like with Jobs, he has a strong reality distortion field and what he feels confident about means very little given how confident he has been about any number of crazy FSD goals that he claimed were months away.For now he feels confident enough that the system won't be degraded so much that he has to stop selling cars, but definitely not confident enough to claim it's on par with Radar.
My less charitable interpretation is that he needs to keep the company afloat and cannot afford to park tens of thousands of cars for weeks or months while waiting on radar components for them. So he is doing what he needs to do to keep things going, but is engaging his reality distortion field to cover for the fact that he is delivering a weaker product to his customers.
I personally hope you are right about things, and I am rooting for them to achieve parity between vision-only and the older hybrid system, but I am not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because of how things have gone down in the past and this whole situation doesn't pass the smell-test as far as I am concerned.