With an operating system UI, the developer may reasonably know what the UI will look like, what features are present, where they are placed. With Uber, a single person may not know all the rules for a single feature, and the rules change frequently, sometimes in the most obtuse ways. Like when San Francisco decided to ban cars from one of its most important artery streets earlier this year (market st). Now not only you need to indicate to a rider that this is a thing, your UI also needs to to provide walking instructions to the nearest designated pickup spot, and the routing algorithm needs to not put drivers on market st. Oh, and don't forget Hebrew speaking tourists read right-to-left and that food delivery bicycles _are_ still allowed on market st. That's just one change in one city.
Consider that just about anything might change anywhere, any time. From how earning breakdowns are displayed for drivers in Sao Paulo (this differs by jurisdiction), to where the pickup locations are in Pearson airport in Toronto (airport rules change all the time), to what promos apply in Mexico City this week (which depends on marketing and finance analysis), to whether surges should be disabled in response to a terrorist attack, to what documents a driver signup rep should be scanning into the system as local regulations change.
Now build all the infrastructure required considering that the people on the ground reporting their local changes are not programmers, and conversely many of these changes may require making changes to the UIs that these people use, how the new data is aggregated, etc. There are literally thousands of greenlight hub / customer support employees worldwide using these internal tools, many don't speak english and timezones are all over the place. The nature of problems are often fuzzy, hyperlocal-specific (e.g. certain forms of fraud), or extremely meticulous (e.g. legalese, etc).
The trouble of scale comes with having to deal with numerous nebulously defined things from numerous stakeholders and having to distill which engineering teams are even responsible for which aspects of which thing. As the number of stakeholders grow, so does the risk of miscommunication, unclear chain of responsibility and other well-documented large organizations challenges.