Lidar, Optical Distance and Time of Flight Sensors

The reason is that you can time-gate the noise out that would otherwise be hitting your correlation accumulators if you have a vague idea of the supposed delay/ToF for the pulse.

However, once you add mechanical scanning, at least for systems with not that many orders of magnitude between range resolution and maximum detection range, you can use systems like mode-locked lasers that for example have around 0.1% native duty cycle, circumvent the issue of peak power through the aperture/scanning 's spatial focusing (each pixel only needs a managable amount of energy, and delivering that in a single pulse won't require unreasonable peak power levels), and still get all the energy-efficiency benefits of single-pulse ranging vs. spread-spectrum/correlation ranging.

The only but major downside is the requirement of mechanical scanning.

That's where the beam diameter at the target is much larger than the target, as for aircraft. With a small scanning dot from a LIDAR and a nice big target like a car, almost all the power hits the target, but you still have inverse square losses coming back.

Last I looked CD readers used a 4-detector sensor's differential low-pass signals for closed-loop track-following so the rotation need not be optically centered. I also see no reason why optical disc readouts would need homodyne let alone heterodyne readout.