Except nobody with a sane mind would consider this an acceptable safety system. It's widely known humans are not capable of performing this job. Period. Everywhere else, where there's a need for long stretches of uninterrupted human focus, you have systems on top of systems ensuring this happens.

In swimming pools, you have lifeguards with <30 minutes shifts, overlapping coverage zones, and managers hovering behind them to ensure they do pay attention. On trains, you have dead-man switches that stop the train if the driver isn't paying attention. The military gives pilots amphetamines if they need to stay awake for long hours. Etc.

You just cannot expect a person to stay focused monitoring something for more than couple minutes. You need to have systems to help them and mitigate the unavoidable lapse in focus. At the very least, they should've taken away her phone and made her narrate what she sees on record, while making her aware it will be reviewed and compared against video recordings afterwards.

They set her up to fail, so it's wise to ask what her role really was. Convenient scapegoat, organizational surge circuit breaker, ablative armor - it's a plausible explanation.

The lidar saw Herzberg 6 seconds before impact, and there are news stories detailing email evidence that Meyhofer and others at UberATG intentionally made the perception system filter sparse lidar returns at the time (likely because they were having difficulty with trees). Today, Meyhofer and others have vested tens of millions in stock following the Softbank investment. While the safety driver was a factor in the crash, there is a gross amount of greed that was also a factor.

Has Uber improved since then? I attended an UberATG recruiting event where they showed a disengagement where they almost hit a little girl after she got off a school bus. (They were showing this because they re-created the scene on their test track and wanted to show they learned something). But in the perception video of the event they showed, you can clearly see there being lidar returns reflected off the school bus mirror, the system clustering them into an object, and the Uber car slowing down for this ghost object. The girl was saved by this false positive, probably not by the safety driver hitting the brakes. Uber does some interesting SDC research, but I would not feel safe being within 100 meters of any of their cars.

Yet she was put in a situation where she had to regularly take her eyes off the road to enter data as part of her job.

Uber is culpable for designing the job such that the risk of accidents significantly increased.

She wasn't looking at the road because she was entering data about the drive into the uber app, at uber's request.

Also, even if she wasn't doing it at uber's request, this is such a predictable event. The driver was paid close to minimum wage... Regardless of how you feel about this, it's definitely the case that people who are paid minimum wage will typically give minimum effort. This was totally forseeable. The people in charge of making this decision at uber were either negligent or willfully ignorant, but there's no excuse to hire someone for near-minimum wage for this job if you truly care about safety.