> "Not being a team player" was often code for not trying hard enough to make your lead look good.

Replace often with always. That's coded language that exactly means this. It's really hard to avoid this though.

> massive tech debt accumulation

Do you know any company that doesn't have that? Honestly I've never seen it. I've worked in a 10 people company, I founded a company with a co-student, I worked in a 50 people company, I currently work in a 95,000 people company and there's always huge loads of technical debt. Also I now often work with Google APIs/tools/frameworks as well as AWS. Also loads of technical debt, right there.

> Implicit quotas for regularly letting people go is just an insane way to run a business.

That's for sure. It's great for getting investors though.