It depends on where you live, of course.
Pre-Uber, I would use taxis when visiting NYC all the time. It was fine; taxis were all over the place, and hailing one was easy. Hotels and some higher-end restaurants would even help line one up for you. Drivers were all over the map, though: some were quiet, some loud, some annoying, some offensive. Most drivers drove aggressively. Some cars were clean, some dirty. The credit card machine was usually "broken" (wink, wink). No good way to get any of this feedback acted on.
In SF (where I've lived since pre-Uber times), taxis were useless. There was pretty much nowhere in the city where you could reliably flag one down. You could call a dispatcher, but the standard answer was "a taxi will pick you up in 20 minutes", and then at least half the time they'd never show up. The rest of the time it'd take at least twice that amount of time.
So I walked or took transit when I had the extra time in my schedule, or I drove. Which sucked in many ways, as parking is annoying in SF, and if I'm going out to drink, it means either carefully controlling how much I drink, and leaving some buffer time at the end of the night to sober up, or leaving my car wherever it is, and hoping I don't get a parking ticket in the morning (a hope that failed often enough to get expensive).
Nowadays I still walk or take transit as much as possible, but I hardly ever drive in the city. Uber/Lyft have completely filled this void. As much as their business practices have been terrible, there's nothing else that fills their niche.
> So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers.
The problem with this is that there's no due process. Some disgruntled rider can be an asshole and rate a driver with 1 star, with a comment about feeling unsafe, and that's it, even if the driver didn't do anything wrong. How is that fair?