You're conflating the rationale for their actions with the execution.

It was logical for those companies to take political action in those instances in order to maintain their business models. How they did so may have been unsavoury, but that's orthogonal to the justification.

The entire business model is unsavory. The basic theory is about atomizing the workforce until they have no power whatsoever, and more profits can flow upwards.

Abusing the app to force drivers to click "yes, i support this" under fear of a "no" click being recorded and held against them is just one small instance of the overall phenomenon.

To my mind, any business which is generating value which didn't exist previously and captures a portion thereof is a savory business.

Uber therefore qualifies.

Uber didn't invent the car or the mobile phone, or cabs or food delivery.

What they invented was a business model that empowers capital and disempowers (some classes of) labor.

I hear their microservice architecture employs a lot of SWEs, though, so they've got that going.

No, Uber combined all those things together in a way that made them more efficient and more appealing to both drivers and riders.

If driving for Uber is worse than being a cab driver, why didn’t the vast majority of Uber drivers drive cabs before?

You don’t need to create completely innovative greenfield technologies in order to generate value.

Remind me again, how much power does a regular taxi driver Joe have under the previous system, where he has to rent a medallion from its rich owner?