Drivers have no obligation to stick to a particular route. The ride can be refunded if the route is egregiously long or indirect. Even then, if there is a valid reason (traffic, road closure) the ride can be upheld.

If riders are quoted a longer than optimal route, then that appears to be deceptive to me.

If they can take someone from A to B and then not get paid for it because of that kind of rule in how the task is preformed that's highly directed work of the kind you would give an employee.

Please take a step back and think about it.

If you contracted me to install cabinets in your kitchen, I couldn't defensibly take 1 year to install them, if I estimated 3 days. This doesn't make all cabinet installers employees.

3 days or 4 days and you still pay. Uber can't offord a 33% increase in trip length when paying per mile so defacto they are going to have very tight tolerances.

Further the scoring is separately done by the customer. So the conversation is "Can you take the scenic trip? Sorry can't." Further it goes that way because Uber drivers are employed by Uber not independent contractors connected by Uber to customers.

I think you interpret "egregious" differently than I do. You appear to be responding to a set of points I never made, while not addressing the one I did.

Why is that? If I have a job and I know exactly how I want it's done then I can't hire a contractor?

The general rule for Contractors is could they hand the work to a 3rd party, though the actual test gets complex. https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc762.html

Basically if you want a sink replaced you can define what the sink will look like and function etc but not which tools they use to fix it. When someone is providing core business functions for a year+ receiving constant directions for short term tasks has direct customer interactions thus representing your business etc they just don't have much wiggle room.

Which is an argument about their employment status, not the alleged fraud issue in the story.