It is pretty easy to spoof GPS locations, at least in Android, in a way that is undectable to apps using location services. Might be a better option for these drivers?
And GPS spoofing as a debug feature is built into Android now, so there's less legitimate reason to need root to do GPS spoofing
Also the article states that the drivers are using 3rd party specialized apps.
Case in point... I found a whole community dedicated to spoofing Pokemon Go -- https://old.reddit.com/r/PokemonGoSpoofing/
When the game was new-ish, and I was on Android, it was trivial. Just install a GPS spoofer, move the on-screen control, and you start walking. Nice when it was winter.
It was also terrible for the gameplay, and they cracked down hard. You can still spoof, but it requires a relatively high degree of technical ability. On iOS, you have to, generally, install a shady enterprise certificate and use a hacked third-party binary of Pokémon Go. On Android, you have to have root, and then jump through many other hoops that are specific to your phone and OS version.
All of that boils down to…yeah, you can always find a hack, but past some level, it becomes extremely fragile, and you would not want to rely on a hack for your livelihood. (And if you are capable of staying ahead of the app and OS developers, well, I suspect there may be a different job opportunity out there for you.)