I knew that part would get a response.
Perhaps what I should have said is "unfairly paints the dealers as more evil than they really are". To the uninitiated, without knowing the reason these laws were enacted in the first place, it implies that they were enacted explicitly to restrict competition. They were enacted to protect then-small businesses from being crushed by large automakers once they were able to afford their own distribution network. This was fair because the dealers had enabled the growth of those automakers in the first place. Obviously, this doesn't apply to Tesla, but the laws in some states were written without considering the possibility of a new automaker eschewing the dealer model altogether. The dealerships are trying to preserve those laws as they're written, and argue that the intent was in fact to require all automakers to use the dealership model, which is extremely disingenuous in my mind. Although it wouldn't surprise me in the least if some dealers actually believe it, I think most are just trying to use that as justification for continuation of a law that they see as beneficial to them, regardless of its intentions.