You seem to be conflating several issues, as well as setting up some straw men, neither of which encourages constructive debate.
One issue is statutory licensing, which may artificially limit the number of people who can drive for-hire vehicles in a given area. It is true that such regimes are vulnerable to local politics and regulatory capture, pushing expenses up for drivers and reducing competition. There are also some arguments in favour of reasonable licensing regimes, not least because there is only so much road space and so much demand for hire vehicles. There is certainly room for debate about how this side of the industry works and whether newer alternative models might be better.
Another issue is safety regulations, which typically restrict things like permitted time behind the wheel without a break or how often vehicles must be maintained and tested. This is quite a different thing from licensing to limit supply in the market, though clearly some method of identifying who is subject to the safety regulations is needed. Here it is common, at least in my country, for professional drivers who spend many hours behind the wheel to be regulated. For example, lorry drivers and coach drivers also have to comply with regulations that don't apply to individuals driving private vehicles for their own purposes. Here, there is much less room for debate. Normal people don't spend the equivalent of an entire working day behind the wheel, day in and day out, with relatively little to keep their attention focused on driving. Even when private individuals make long journeys by car, they rarely spend as long behind the wheel as lorry drivers do daily. And of course the service and mandatory testing intervals for private cars are set with private driving in mind, while vehicles used commercially tend to do much higher mileage.
As a third related issue there is insurance. It is a legal requirement in my country for every driver to have proper insurance to certain minimum standards. Note that this is primarily for the protection of others: as far as I know, you can still drive a personal car without insurance to cover wrapping it around a tree and writing it off, but you may not legally drive it without "third party" insurance that would cover any damage you do if you wrap it around someone else's car and write off both vehicles. Insurance policies typically specify things like the type of vehicle and how it will be used and are priced accordingly, and the insurance industry probably has a better understand of the true risks of different types of driving than anyone else. So letting people drive commercially when their insurance doesn't cover it would just be a loophole and a clear risk to other road users who won't be protected as the law requires in the event of an accident.
I don't think the people who question services like Uber on regulatory grounds are necessarily against competition or innovation in the marketplace. I'm certainly not; I write software every day for businesses that do stuff no-one has done before that is only possible because of that software, so why would I want to hold back progress? But some of those regulations really are there for good, sensible, practical reasons, and I don't think a new entrant into the market should get a free pass on breaking the rules that apply to everyone else just because they're new.