It's also the classic bundled vs individual components debate. Uber is bundled and Lyft is a component. Usually there's room in the market for both.
I have no idea if it's a profitable venture for them - supposedly they're the "operating partner" which I guess means the actual owners pay them a fee to handle all the logistics while the owners themselves are responsible for the profit and loss of the system overall. Can anyone provide more detail here?
So their market is a race to the bottom. Which is a indicator of an effective market. Only non-effective markets have large profit margins.
Consider that each country needs their own specialized team of engineers to deal with its own unique problems. Then you need reliability engineers, you need engineers building administrative tooling, payments, security, so much shit. You really do need thousands of engineers.
[1] https://onde.app