VL53L1X Time of flight sensor field of view implications
All lasers put out a fairly wide "cone" of light.   If you want a narrow beam, you have to put a lens on the end of your laser.  Usually the manufacturers provide this automatically.  If you want the natural beam, you have to ask for a laser which doesn't have any built-in lens.  (Laser light is monochromatic point-source light.  It need not be collimated/parallel light.)

As far as I can determine, the above simple facts are never taught in any grade-school science book, where instead they insist that lasers always put out parallel beams.   (No, HeNe lasers don't.  They have "confocal" cavities, with sphere-wave output.  Neither do diode lasers, with their tiny cavities and wide-diffracted beams. Both have a lens, otherwise the natural laser beam would be spreading.)    But in the above type of sensor, its IR diode-laser is probably being spread out even wider than its naturally-wide, cone-shaped beam.

Look at the ST corp datasheet PDF.  Basically, this sensor has a 256-pixel camera inside it, ultrahigh-speed pixels.   Its microprocessor can disable all but a certain number of them.  This lets you program the "view" which the device actually sees, with 4X4 (16 pixel) minimum, and 16x16 (256 pixel) maximum.