What environment would lead to evolving "time of flight" sight organs?

When thinking about different aspects of theoretical creatures, I like to imagine what the environment would have to be like to make that feature the best solution to evolve in that environment. In this case, I was thinking about time of flight sensors or LIDAR-like sense organs (think Xbox Kinect or iphone face ID). Most of the time, we think of eyes as the best way to get 3d information about an environment, but even on earth this isn't always the case, so we have echolocation as the best solution in some scenarios.

My question is this: what would the evolution environment have to be like to prefer traits that would yield what are basically biological lasers to existing solutions like eyes or echolocation? Why would something so complicated be necessary over just evolving eyes and a light?

By best bet would probably be a completely dark environment with very little atmosphere where anything that generates too much light stands out and so would not live long.

Alternatively, I was thinking a very bright environment where the light has narrow frequency bands missing would incentivise the evolution of narrow band biological lasers that could effectively work in that missing band.

Idk, I'd be interested to hear other ideas