1) Nobody's working on this kind of stuff just for the money, and if they are then they've lied to a lot of people and are fucking up. If you're a strong engineer with good quantitative skills, the expected value of working on wall street, working at googazonsoft, or even becoming a realtor in the bay (if you have the soft skills) is much higher than striking out on your own to create something new. A technical founder I met from one of these companies could have easily done one of these other things but felt really passionate about improving our relationship to food. I really doubt there's a money grubbing evil genius working on food sharing apps in order to amass great wealth and power.
2) You can't really manipulate society with $50M of facebook ads and no product (and I think that's more than any of these companies have raised). If you're making a consumer app and it's not something people want, there's no "marketing, combined with PR, government relations, and legal" that's going to get them to use it and "conform to the goals of the business".
IDK, maybe I'm just a dumb optimist but I'm excited about what the future holds for this stuff.
With an essentially zero chance of becoming a billionaire.
If you're driven by the desire to become a billionaire, startups it is.
Without those advantages, it's almost laughable to replicate that career path
That said, I disagree completely and vehemently with most of what you said. Allow me to respond to what I believe the salient pieces were. I'll rephrase for brevity, but please let me know if I've mis-represented your position in doing so:
1 - "Sharing economy doesn't undo regulations, they just demand new types." To date, we haven't seen the sharing economy demand "new types" of regulations; we've seen it completely ignore existing regulations and lobby against any replacement, even where those regulations are reasonable (e.g., requiring commercial drivers to have commercial auto insurance, w/r/t Uber).
2 - "Don't fit well ... not a reason to dismiss them entirely." That is a strawman. I did not advocate for dismissing them entirely. I don't generally advocate for eliminating viable business models out of bureaucratic laziness. The current situation, however, is "ignore public health regulations until we kill enough people to draw attention to ourselves." That is not an acceptable road forward under any circumstance, and being adamantly opposed to it is not the same as being entirely opposed to the existence of an "uber for chefs", or whatever we're calling it.
3- I disagree about the "order of magnitude" argument. It's rather like dismissing an Uber approach to user safety on the argument that each driver is just one driver. We must address it as the entire service, which collectively - if it scales, and let's be fair, scaling is the point - would end up serving enormous numbers of people.
4- "Imagine if healthy, home-cooked dinner was cheap and convenient." An appeal to pathos. Largely irrelevant to the discussion, and also to the services as they exist(which generally involve sit-down meals for groups of people at fairly immodest prices).
Here's one from the OP that's starting with affordable stuff (users price, kind of like sidecar): https://josephine.com/
I think what they're doing is pretty cool and I've heard it's mostly busy parents buying the meals. Hope they come to LA soon as I'd love to try some of the yummy smells I pick up walking around Echo Park in the evening! (sorry for the pathos?)
In other words, new startups pushing the envelope should be expected, and there's nothing wrong with that. We just have to decide as a society how far they should be able to code and adapt the regulation accordingly.