Waymo has three separate groups:
Fleet Reponse - Monitors the fleet, provides path suggestions when the car asks. Doesn't joystick the car, as this video clearly shows.
Rider Assistance (aka Rider Support) - The lady on the speaker. Interacts with riders, answers questions about the car, the trip, billing, etc.
Roadside Assistance - Employees out on the road who show up when a van breaks down or goes rogue.
Let's use these names to cut down on confusion. The three groups obviously weren't on the same page here. I've worked in giant, bureaucratic organizations and in tiny entrepreneurial startups. Waymo is the former. They developed great autonomous technology years ahead of anyone else but completely botched the rollout. That's on Krafcik, and IMHO is why he's gone. Imagine the thousands of long meetings to hash out all the processes and training procedures just for these three groups. And they still get it horribly wrong, because they're trying to handle problems they haven't yet faced instead of "moving fast and breaking things". Contrast with Elon Musk who has 50k employees but still tries Bitcoin payment on a whim. Oops, the greenie customer base doesn't like BTC's massive energy waste? OK, cancel that idea and move on to the next one.
Is it irresponsible to put a laughably inept FSD Beta into the hands of end users? Perhaps. But it keeps the ball moving forward. Waymo spends the entire pre-season in the classroom drawing plays on whiteboards, then when the game starts they all run into each other trying to execute a basic handoff.
The problem with assessing Waymo is that we don't know when remote assistance is making a decision vs the software.
Maybe JJRicks can chime in, but I think he's said in the past the display changes.
It is interesting that you've personally experienced 4 disengagements over about 1,100 miles of rides.
Waymo's 30k mile metric is for "safety related disengagements". Companies have different definitions of safety-related, which makes the reporting pretty useless. Apple apparently used to count all kinds of stuff others ignored.
Does Waymo actively avoid construction zones?
I certainly hope so! Don't you? Just last night I exited the highway to avoid a really bad one. Unfortunately there was a different construction zone on the frontage road, so I still got stuck for 5 minutes...