This wasn't a big issue back in 2014, so there wouldn't have been much if any discussion on it for a much smaller service that had almost no market share.
That's a different memory than I have, where it was huge by late 2013. Here's a HN story from mid 2014 where a taxi company discusses adapting by selling medallions (and thus ceding some car's right to street hails) and going more app-based in order to compete with Uber, so yes, low cost Uber rides were huge then.
We were talking about Sidecar, not Uber. SideCar was not huge at any point in its lifecyle. At one point in 2016/2017 it very briefly had the opportunity to become big, but failed the execution.
We were talking about whether critics are going to go hands-off for a company that does it the "right" way (and grant driver's genuine independence) as Sidecar did, when they have a viable example to point to. As best I can tell, no one distinguished Uber from Sidecar when the latter was a legit rival. Example of a typical article that mentioned the three but said nothing about what made Sidecar's case more defensible.
So yes, I'm skeptical that there's anyone out there who would actually follow through and recognize a driver as a contractor even if they had 100% control of who they accepted that platform really were just a matchmaker.
Edit: If nothing else, I think that shows that SC was significant enough to be talked about alongside Uber.
