It's not like it's a desirable occupation. It's unskilled work. What you see is people using it as a temporary way to make money between other jobs. Not sure why that's damning.

Taxi-driving is a full-time job with tons of people who've been doing it for years. Is taxi-driving a desirable occupation for skilled workers? Lyft and Uber aren't keeping drivers for a straightforward reason: they're a comparably worse value proposition than being a taxi driver used to be.

I'm not saying there aren't advantages to the new system. There certainly are. But the drivers are bearing the brunt of the downsides.

Right, drivers no longer have the barriers to entry that prevent competition. The ones that don't bear the brunt are new drivers.