>Why? It's a low margin business and stuff like this drives up cost for everyone. I'd rather have low cost rides than talking to human support

To be picky, it is a negative margin business (at least until now).

Still this is not a reason to have not decent customer support.

The usual approach (not necessarily by Uber, almost everyone is on this - IMHO flawed - track) is the periodical announcement roughly on the lines of "our automated, automagical AI/whatever is so perfect that the service/product was so bettered that the need for support was reduced to 0.0000000000001% of customers". (which is good)

Then, IF it was actually true (it usually isn't) that single request every zillion transactions/sales could be actually dealt with properly with a marginal cost by a human (possibly someone actually capable and with the powers to actually provide some form of remediation).

I want a refund, but am unable to get through the bots to actual people who might be able to help me.

What would you do in my situation?

Honestly their bots are pretty good about giving back refunds - I've never had problem