In my opinion AOD and Lift to check are not the same. Lift to check requires a user's iteraction with the device and it turns the screen on. With AOD a user can easily get some basic information about notifications and time just by looking at the phone.
For example If I take part in a business meeting, it is considered rude and unacceptable to check the phone (in most cases) and iteract with it (Lift to check) while AOD requires only a quick look to get the infromation.
In this question I agree with
@Casper and
@cornelis about providing as much feautures and choises for the user as possible. And I totally disagree with
@Mayendra : suddenly I want the device I am using most often to be as convinient and flexible as possible for all my and others needs. And I am using (and will use) the forum to discuss my optnion with the developers and other users: that is what it was made for. I will not start a flame-war about what a true, a budget, a pre-true, an upper-intermidiate true, etc. flagship is, but you do not know how the Asus IPS screen looks like when adjusted to run in AOD mode.
Regarding the AOD development. Assuming that AOD is available fot ROG 2 (with xLED screen), the Asus developers already have a codebase for the feautre itself. As I understand the question is just to tune the kernel/drivers. It might be too labor-intensive to do this or maybe the marketing team is simply afraid that somebody will once say that Zenfone 6 is rubbish in terms of battery life just because an average user does not read popups/disclaimers and cannot mach a (I hope slightly) worse battery life with the AOD feature, or a dozen of any other reasons.