Success as a product company relative to others. I'm talking about simple selection bias.

A no-financing company with a decent head count is probably in the top 1 percentile among peers. Chances are they're delivering real value.

A VC backed startup hiring a bunch of people is perfectly average. The top 1% for startups would probably be post-IPO/exit/very-late-stage.

So it seems perfectly normal to me a VC backed startup in most cases will look like a total trainwreck compared to a bootstrapped company of the same size.

The vast majority of bootstrapped companies die before they even had a chance to hire anybody. Unlikely you'd ever have to deal with them.