Agreed, but it's a balance, and in many parts of the world, transportation user needs had been disregarded for so long that there was wide popular support for breaking with the status quo and rebalancing power in favor of the user. Everyone who was an adult city dweller pre-Uber has taxi horror stories at the ready, of not getting picked up, of being overcharged, of unsafe driving, of dirty cars, of feeling threatened or disrespected by the driver — and not feeling like they had any effective recourse. This is what caused the market to be ripe for disruption, the users' sense of powerlessness in the face of a bunch of local players set in their ways and gripped by local worker politics, in the way that most industries are thankfully not.

In the process, Uber clearly behaved illegally and unethically towards its workers and government regulators. That's been known for a while. Could it have been different? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes governments don't listen until they're forced to.

Now about the working conditions of cab drivers, honestly in many places they were already being screwed over by local oligopolies (for a prime example of this, see for example the NYC medallion auction scams which defrauded individual drivers of hundreds of thousands of dollars). In the Uber story, drivers got shuttled from one shitty situation to another probably just about as shitty.

Hopefully the new set of players in that space now abide by the local rules, and also the regulators learn from their failures and get on top of the industry without forgetting about their users too much.