I grew up in shithole tiny town rural state. Our town of 7000 people had a few sketchy seeming taxis that I always wondered how they could possibly work.
Then I became a cashier at the local grocery store and noticed basically the entire underclass of that town used those taxis daily. Their service was so reliable that our front end manager would call the taxis for these people while they were still checking out as a courtesy.
Yet when my girlfriend tries to get an Uber in the city of 60k that I live in now, it's a crapshoot whether there is one AT ALL, or whether it shows up when it says, or whether your driver will even know where you are going (it's not a complicated city). So maybe if taxis sucked where you used them, maybe you could have fixed that instead of fucking over perfectly working taxis for the rest of us by supporting an industry player who explicitly was trying to kill taxis as a small business.
My local taxi company didn't have to support 2k Silicon Valley priced software engineers, didn't spend some of that effort building tools to identify and blackball cops trying to stop people from using an illegal service, and didn't force their drivers to sleep in their cars to make their normal wage.
In Europe (at least the UK and Germany) it seems to be the opposite. Outside of a big-city Uber is non-existent and you are relying on local taxi-firms.
Have you ever tried having to call a taxi outside of a city. You have to call and if they even answer they are like "what u want".
.. umm is this the taxi?
Yeah why didnt you say you needed a taxi?
What ? So are you able to pick me up?