I appreciate the condescension, but saying that a state thinks something when referring to an enforcement ruling from a particular office is very misleading. In particular you can say the state both simultaneously thinks that they are contractors (how the rest of the Uber employees are treated) and it thinks that they are not (the ruling outcome of this one case).
So saying a state thinks something when there are many conflicting internal positions is worthless and just ends up being a tool to push a particular political agenda.
People actually think lots of apparently conflicting ideas - a common one being believing in religion and understanding science - and in fact the person you originally responded to pointed out the supposed "conflict" here - that individual contractors, despite being "independent" companies, may have collective bargaining rights.
The comment I replied to made it sound as if the state had some kind of position on the matter, but the linked evidence was only that a particular office ruled on one single case.
>california most definitely thinks they're workers,
That's what happens when comments get a lot of downvotes. You don't see a "karma" score on HN, but comments with negative number of votes get more and more grayed out until they are hardly visible.
So saying a state thinks something when there are many conflicting internal positions is worthless and just ends up being a tool to push a particular political agenda.