Germany is one of those, too. We have fairly good taxi services in any larger city, at least as far as I've seen as a user in the last 15 years. They usually have clean cars, are there on time (or waiting in taxi queues in front of public spots) and take you to your destination without major detours. I've never encountered any case (visible to me as the customer) of tax evasion or trickery with manipulated meters, so I guess correct metering is properly enforced by the regulators. And, very important: they also had apps for summoning them spontaneously and tracking their approach and optionally paying them relatively quickly after smartphones became ubiquitous and had those in widespread use by drivers, either provided by private non-taxi-related corporations (like MyTaxi) or by conglomerates of taxi companies that bound together to develop an app.

But I had multiple opportunities to "enjoy" taxi services of the classic kind in the US, specifically San Francisco and Miami, before and after Uber was a thing. And I definitely see quite a difference to the level of service I enjoyed back home, especially in the "before" time. I even think that this difference wasn't present in the minds of the Uber management - they probably thought that any taxi service in the world was generally as bad as the one in San Francisco and was thus in need of "disruption", and it seemed as if it took a while for them to notice that this wasn't the case, and to realize that people in places of the world with fairly well-working taxi networks might have much less understanding for their "civil disobedience", as you call it.