This is why this model is very frowned upon by European societies as it inevitably leaves taxpayers to pick up the tab in the form of basic social security.
There's a reason most of their couriers are immigrants: anyone else can get paid more stocking a supermarket or driving a cab.
Certainly the freeing could have been done better, but the system before wasn't exactly healthy either. There was a fixed number of taxi licenses, and taxi companies were of course heavily lobbying against increasing the number. Since there were so few of them, good luck getting a taxi on a weekend night. Then again, if you were lucky and got a taxi, it was a shiny clean Mercedes (which perhaps tells something about the profit margins they were running at).
I think licensing system we had made sense, prices were capped, service was at least controlled and availability during all times was guaranteed. Ofc, this lead to some issues when there was extreme demand...
It would be ridiculously easy to just copy the US and do away with the social welfare system. See how many will actually save for their retirement lol.