"People start companies because they want to have control and impact and work on interesting things and have more ownership."

That's true. If these are the founders' main goals, they'll be less averse to raising the acquisition price or working in bigger teams. They don't even need to be a startup -- they could also be happy as an autonomous research project under the wing of a big company.

I was talking about founders hoping to get rich by selling their companies after a few years. In this case, they want the company to be small, inexpensive, and have few strings attached, to attract as many acquirers as possible.

Occasionally, two startups might be a perfect match for each other -- their combined product is far greater than the sum of the parts. In these cases, it makes sense to merge. It sounds like this is what you mean.