What's missing from this argument is that opportunities to make ongoing profit without considerable ongoing investments tend to be VERY short lived in the tech field. Assuming that steady revenue will last, will lead you to ending up crashing as hard as Atari.

You grew a steady, low-stress $1MM/year lifestyle business? Great. Now thousands of people are going to see what you're doing, and dozens are going to try to clone you, many of them far better connected than you are. Software is rarely like the e.g. restaurant business, where you can own a scarce piece of property in a good location and don't have to compete with the whole world, or other defendable advantages. Tech startups tend to have far fewer defendable advantages.

Once you realize this, it becomes obvious that "grow or die" is the nature of the business. Not some silly scheme that only exists due to VCs forcing it upon entrepreneurs.

Long-term opportunities that are easily defendable with minimal effort are extremely rare in the tech startups field.

On top of that, guess which type of businesses are, by far, the most attractive to cloners and other competition? - those "ideal" lifestyle businesses that make profits from early on and require minimal upfront investment.

Edit: Or instead of Atari, insert here all the other profitable businesses that you've never heard of, who got crushed after a couple years because they slowed their investments into innovating, assuming that their very steady profits would continue instead of dropping off a cliff. Happened to me twice.