I think the argument is more that even if you were to magically get rid of the cruft introduced by institutional bloat, the app will still necessarily be large given the nature of the business. Uber isn't some outlier here either; Lyft, Ola, Yandex, GoJek, Grab, etc etc all have comparable iOS app sizes.
It sounds stupid, but I'm going to say that they're all doing it wrong. One commenter in this thread brought up the Uber app for Android and it's a fraction of the size–clearly, market constraints can make it possible to do better?
