You can make the argument, "Well, they should know better, and if not it doesn't matter." I find that weak. The legal system is amazingly complex around business and fault during accidents. It's so complex, that there are attorneys that spend their entire career focusing on things like this. When dealing with insurance there is no, "Well it's ok, I'm insured." It's, "I'm insured if I can prove I didn't break any of the insurance contract rules," and the people on the other side, they're all better at this than you are. Most people who drive for Uber, etc. have no idea this is how it really is. The driving companies have pushed all this off to individuals, because they know the consequences of them getting involved, and this is why there needs to be laws surrounding things like this.
Gig work is new, and doesn't fit cleanly into the existing framework. Uber et al.'s patch for reconciling gig-work appears to many to be essentially a wholesale rejection of the spirit of the agreement, thus opening up new existential risks for those of small means.
While those arguments may land short of the complete truth, they do appear to hold some merit; Maybe it's simply ignorance, but I'm not aware of Uber advocating for a comprehensive review of how California provides life-support benefits to residents in a way that ensures their service providers are not unduly at risk relative to the general population. Instead, proposition 22 appears to be as close to 'I've transacted profitably; fuck your life, it's not my problem.' as they could hope to achieve.
That's a a failing of your local/state/federal legislators not the company.
So the problem was the insurance company, not the gig economy itself.
Making drivers employees isn’t the only solution. There are any number of profession that are required to have appropriate insurances
Fortunately no one was injured. I was on my way to pick up a passenger, but it was only me in the vehicle.
When I went to make my insurance claim to fix several thousand dollars worth of damage to my car, I discovered that despite having done a lot of research when trying to buy the right insurance with a rideshare rider and which was compatible with Lyft's own insurance, I wasn't covered. I had to eat the bill.
Fortunately, I was a software engineer moonlighting and I had savings to take care of it, rather than a typical Lyft driver living with far less cushion.
This sort of thing doesn't happen when you're an employee. The essence of the gig economy is doing away with hard-won labor protections and increasing profitability by offloading risk onto workers, creating the statistical certainty that a fraction of your workforce will experience circumstances far more tragic than mine.