It’s a step in a new direction, a proof of concept. Maybe in the future something similar could be useful for road work or on mars or idk. No innovation & development without experimenting. You have to start somewhere and with stuff that is available.
And even if nothing comes of it, I bet it was a fun project to work on.
In engineering school we created a robot that does specific tasks for a contest. It was a lot of work, but that was the main goal. Using an existing device that already has a LIDAR (and probably SLAM) sounds like a very smart move to me, for a project where you want to focus on other problems that have no existing solution yet.