That may be the case in the US, but not so in other countries.
For example in Australia minimum wage is $26.44/hr. But If you don’t have a job, you can get between $740 and $1047 every two weeks as welfare, forever.
Employers know this. Employees know this. So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
This does mean that you're effectively only earning 40c for every $1 you earn in that middle band, but that's still less of a disincentive than just taking the whole payment away above a certain threshold.
I think we could move to a UBI surprisingly easily by giving everyone the dole and then taxing their income a bit more.
The subhead from the post: "The percentage of the U.S. labor force that is functionally unemployed"
Yeah, though the problem in the U.S. is we have a constant influx of workers perfectly happy to serve as scabs, and no mainstream political party is willing to address the problem in any meaningful way.
Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, and artificially restricting the supply increases the demand for your own labor, allowing you to live a better life at the expense of large corporations having to pay more for salaries than executive bonuses. Whoda thunk.
Yes, that was the last time we had unions strong enough in the US to bear teeth. We should strive back towards that.