The difference between a contractor and an employee isn’t arbitrarily. Basically, if you’re using company equipment, following the companies schedule, and don’t have a clear task with a clear finishing condition then you’re an employee.

Finding someone to fill in for a secretary on maternity leave is fine, but open ended contacts on their equipment and schedule without some specific task is just opening them up to lose another lawsuit.

I also wouldn't want to be an employee. I work best in short monthly bursts with legitimate breaks in between. I'm working on setting it up so I can do that as an experienced consultant/freelancer.

The job market is pretty different though for full time employees - one part of which is the insane contractor usage at big companies with money. Microsoft is still like 50% contractors, and in this area if you have "contractor for a bigco" attached to your resume I'd estimate you'll be talked to by far fewer recruiters, and then offered less lucrative work. Also as others have stated you'll have up to 60% of what the company pays for your work taken by the contracting agency especially if they do "management" for their workforce.

Then benefits are a real thing. I have some healthcare needs which require me to have consistent insurance that isn't going to force me to other providers just because I switch. Retirement investing without a 401k is basically all cash since the roth and regular IRA limit is so low. I'm still figuring out how that will work, whether I should incorporate as a consultant so I can provide a 401k to myself, or just not bother with it and just invest.

And it's fine to be a contractor—as long as that's genuinely and meaningfully what you are.

If you're contracting out your services to only one company, and they have primary say over when and how you work[1], then that's not a genuine "contractor" relationship; you're an employee that they're taking advantage of by paying less and not providing benefits to.

If you really do want to be a contractor, who sells their services to many companies, sets their own hours, and has primary control over their tasks and such, then by all means do so. But please don't try to make things worse for the vast majority who do not want these things by advocating for stripping away protections from people who are being abusively and illegally misclassified as contractors.

[1] I don't recall offhand all the various specific aspects of a job that define whether you're logically a contractor or an employee, but I do remember that it's basically "if your livelihood depends entirely on one company paying you, and/or they have near-total control over how you do your work, you're an employee, whatever the paperwork says".