As unfortunate and depressing as it is, a lot of that is required or strongly encouraged by the IRS. Otherwise, it starts treating the contractors as actual employees: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contr...

Sadly, the entire point is that they are not employees, let alone second class ones. In the end, it boils down to the perennial question of how much of your work is done by employees and how much by vendors. And it always leads to awkward situations. (Quite a few of those when I was an employee at Google and something I don't see as much anymore, luckily.)