The stuff that "people" are saying is pure bullshit. It's all stuff that is used to manipulate naive twentysomethings into wage slavery at below-market wages. Those options are not going to amount to anything either, statistically speaking. The first rule of working in startups: never accept lower than market base salary. Second rule: move out if you do not see career advancement (architecting and delivering major parts the software stack while learning skills that are heavily in demand outside, or managing others to deliver nontrivial product). Be completely unsentimental about these two points, and you can still make something out of the experience.
People sacrifice or significantly defer personal goals such as dating, marrying, and very often, having children, because they (rightly) perceive these things as cutting into their work time, and therefore, their rise up the career ladder.
I did a bit of that, and I regret it. The fact is, if you do it for a fixed amount of time (five years), and get a payoff and use it wisely, it would be worthwhile. But that depends on so many things going exactly right as to make it almost impossible.