A high quality score gives you an effective discount in the ad auction. You might only need to pay $0.01 for that ad, whereas your competitor would need to pay $1
That's BS semantics. Their algorithms are based more on the age of your domain and other technicalities, rather than some hypothetical meaning of "search intention".
Today you're much more likely to get directed to some SEO-optimised highly monetised blog content because they bought an incredibly old domain name rather than what you're actually looking for.
One of which is "dwell time" and another is "bounce rate". Both those correlate highly with how well the site matches the users intention.
Bounce is mainly irrelevant as we mostly use Google to find a particular page on a website.
We can quibble about the philosophical role of modern search engines I guess, but the basic idea is just that it should be easy to defensively bid on your own thing.
For all it is, allowing competitors to bid against each other just makes them more money. And the truth is that the customers who would click on a Lyft ad for “uber” query would not care if it was Uber indeed - as otherwise they would be intelligent enough to find Uber as a lower match.
So frankly “being the canonical source for the brand is a steep discount” is not their policy and I don’t really see how that policy is even motivated, financially or in terms of user-friendliness.