Automotive LiDAR is designed to meet Class-1 laser eye-safety standard, which means "safe under normal conditions." It isn't some subjective/marketing thing, it is an official laser safety classification that is very regulated.
However, if you try to break that "normal conditions" rule by pressing your eyeball directly against an automotive LiDAR sensor for a very long period of time while it is blasting, you might cause yourself some damage.
The reason for why your phone camera would get damaged, but not your eyes, is due to the nature of how camera lenses work. They are designed to gather as much light as possible from a direction and focus it onto a flat, tiny sensor. The same LiDAR beam that is spread out for a large retina can become hyper-concentrated onto a handful of pixels through the camera optics.
Class 1 is pretty darned safe, but if you're continually bathed by 50 passing cars an hour while walking on a sidewalk... pitch it to a PhD student you know as something they should find or run a study on.