Doordash has been a publicly traded company for ~2 years and has a market cap of ~20B.
You really have a generous definition of "charade," as I think the public market valuations seem to imply there is some incredibly massive true value in these businesses.
So the charade is how do they stay afloat, and have this huge valuation.
The OP also specifically says the point of the charade is to "make huge amounts of money for the founder and the initial VCs". Uber/Doordash didn't just make huge amounts of money for the founders and initial VCs, it made huge amounts of money for early employees, later employees, current employees, the initial VCs, the later VCs. People have had years to exit their positions and unlimited liquidity to do so... some other rational actor was happy to buy the shares they were selling. If you say these companies are charades than so is every publicly traded company.
UBER currently trades at $27, well below its IPO price of $42 in May 2019, and we had pretty noticeable inflation in the meantime. So how have they made money for early investors and employees is not much of a charade: by selling to a greater fool :(
In other countries where the city is a lot more dense and min wage is low, these delivery apps are okay-ish.