Apparently they used something similar for production on avatar: stereo cameras for depth estimation which allowed realtime depth composition of CG characters onto the shots they were taking, which makes it a lot easier to get everyone on the same page about the scene, especially with characters that are outside normal human proportions. But it wasn't good enough for the final shots.

That would require calibration with the camera, and even then the camera and lidar sensor can’t be in exactly the same place. I doubt results would be better.

Well sort of, the industry tried to go way beyond that by capturing the entire light field: https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lytro-cinema-is-giving-fil...

per pixel depth does not solve for semi-transparency.