I skimmed the studies since the are linked in the main article. It does in fact seem like they bias towards which position they had as a prior, but I would still say that they are useful. Both provide approximate bounds. So we have a lower bound of $9/hr and an upper bound of $23/hr (now this doesn't mean that we should say it is $16/hr). But the things the studies did bring up a lot of questions. Both did nefarious things (lower wage study is including the vehicle cost as part of expenses and higher wage poorly tries to account for "lurkers" by only counting idle times that directly lead to a ride.)

For example, one of the big differences in the studies was how they accounted for "working." One did with app open and the other did idle time that directly led to rides. So if Uber and Lyft are required to pay for idle time, how are they going to handle people that pass on rides and just sit idle? Do you get banned from the platform if you pass on x amount of rides? I'd imagine whatever the policy (not stated in the article) is going to get harsher if they aren't paid by the ride and rather by a combination of hourly and ride. Since it is clearly difficult to actually determine hours working. Or maybe I'm over thinking it and the amount of people sitting idle is actually really low where it isn't a big deal. Does anyone know?

[0] Berkeley released this comparison which is kinda odd and biases towards the lower wage study. The odd things are like #4 how they say the high wage study is void because it includes tips and technically the state doesn't count tips as hourly wage, but if we're talking about take-home that's an important number. https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2020/07/Comparison-of-two-Se...