If the requirements to acheive their bonus isn't aligned with the best interests of the company that is a failure of the company and not the employee.
It’s totally ok if you feel like a bonus should be paid to an employee for achieving something special, but if your employees do not go beyond the bare minimum that keeps them their job, you’re in a kind of trouble that a bonus payment cannot fix.
I think it's important to differentiate between a "meanginful" share of the company and stock options in general. For the average engineer, joining after employee #10 where founder allocated 10% to an ever-diluting option pool, that doesn't seem likely.
Perhaps public companies' profit-sharing plans are closer to the mark, except that an individual employee is so much less likely to have the power to "move the needle" on profit that even that's questionable.