Just adding to your point: in all of the start-ups I worked for, the main selling points were (a) more responsibility sooner and (b) chance to drive decision-making about tech stack and/or work with the best tools (new or old) without red tape.
I’ve never seen (or heard of) any start-up actually fulfill these selling points any better than medium-to-large companies.
More responsibility sooner typically just translates into the usual crap about “wearing many hats” — which is to say your “responsibility” means doing whatever whimsical thing that other people say you have to do, with no regard for your career goals.
In start-ups, I’ve only ever witnessed people getting less autonomy and much less freedom to learn. At the same time, the earliest engineers might have made very poor commitments to certain extreme philosophies about programming and engineers who come later have to clean up these messes while experiencing a lot of dogma from the early stage people.
I’ve personally seen this happen several times with ex-Google employees who join as the earliest engineers and insist on setting up copies of what they recall from Google, mostly insisting on a monorepo regardless of any use case details, insisting on using Bazel or a similar homebrewed build file system, insisting on the same style of canary deployments.
You have to be really careful to avoid these places unless you’re perfectly happy to be a cog implementing these patterns based on someone else’s authority-from-big-company-X. You might even have a super senior job title, yet still just be shuffling code according to someone else’s dogma, while being told the company doesn’t want “dogmatic” engineers.
All this is just to say: be careful. Taking a start-up job because you think you’ll get more responsibility or be given autonomy or discretion in project architecture or tooling decisions is often a big mistake.
By this point, I believe candidates simply need to reject start-up jobs categorically.
Unless the job is paying full market total compensation (excluding non-liquid equity), top of the line benefits, and provides full transparency, just say no. Investors looking to back start-ups simply have to accept that the up-front costs from day one include ensuring employees earn fair market compensation exclusive of the risks associated with start-up equity. That’s just table stakes of hiring a team, period. It does not matter what optimistic outcomes you’d like for candidates to believe about you in exchange for dramatically less compensation.