If a large brand like Uber wouldn‘t buy (really expensive) keywords like „uber“ some of their rivals like lyft could bid on it. So uber would lose a customer who was really interested in uber to lyft. Exchange company names how you like. Its especially expensive for shops etc.
Google will not change any rules to forbid bidding on brand names because they are making a ton of money of it. Think of something like amazon paying more than $1 for every click just to not loose any potential customer. Adwords is a money burning system.
Interesting note -- Amazon does not allow you to bid for a competitor's brand name, nor does it allow you to use your competitor's brand name as a keyword.
In my experience, you can try, but you'll get 0 impressions. Not sure how this works for very generic brand names though (e.g. "band-aid")
I imagine that might be in response to the malware advertising that was going on for fortnite a while back, and how quite a large proportion of the players are kids. As a highly visible brand and a highly vulnerable audience, it makes sense for them to focus efforts there and put in special rules.
I think you are correct in why they put the extra effort in, but the criticism is they should be doing this anyway, for all the ads. Not just because the target audience for a specific keyword is more vulnerable to scams.
Of course, that's what Google is basically. You search for something and they show an ad related to that. And those ads are not random but related to your search.
Google will not change any rules to forbid bidding on brand names because they are making a ton of money of it. Think of something like amazon paying more than $1 for every click just to not loose any potential customer. Adwords is a money burning system.