Imagine making your product compliant across 100+ countries while regulatiions, labor-laws, tax rules, insurance requirements, and data privacy laws keep changing.
Imagine itegrating dozens of payment methods - many of them highly localized - across emerging and developed markets, while dealing with fraud, chargebacks, KYC, AML, and settlement complexities.
Imagine processing trillions of data points every day - rides, location updates, pricing signals, ETAs, traffic conditions, demand forecasts, payments, support events.... storing it efficiently, querying it in near real time, generating reports, and keeping the whole pipeline reliable. I have woorked in data engineering, and can tell you confidently that this alone requires an enormous R&d budget.
Then there are the apps - not just customer-facing, but driver-facing, courier-facing, merchant-facing, fleet-management, onboarding, support, operations, compliance, finance, and hundreds of internal tools and dashboards.
Then come the integrations. Companies running at Uber's scale genemrally have hundreds of tjese - mapping providers, payment processors, banks, identity verification, tax systems, telecoms, customer support platforms, fraud detection, analytics, ERP, CRM, and more.
... And then there are even more...
Real-time routing and dispatch optimization
Dynamic pricing and marketplace balancing
Fraud detection and account security
Driver/rider safety systems
ML models for ETA, demand forecasting, incentives, and churn prevention
Experimentation infrastructure for thousands of A/B tests
Reliability engineering across globally distributed systems
Data centers / cloud optimization at massive scale
Localization across languages, currencies, addresses, and cultural norms
Customer support automation at global scale
Autonomous vehicle research, mapping, and computer vision
... to be fair, this is all what I could thing of based on my own work experience in related fields... there is definitely as many more systems in reality as mentioned abpve.