Compensation that can't be traded for cash should be valued quite close to zero, regardless of the length of the exercise window.
1. I can actually go one better on that. I worked at one company that had a "can't lost" stock purchase program. You put aside money with each paycheck and you would get stock purchased at the lower of the price at the beginning of the year and the end of the year with a 10% discount. Of course in the time between when the shares were purchased at the beginning of January and when they were delivered at the end of January, the stock fell 50%. They never recovered their value and I ended up getting cashed out when the company that bought them went private at around 10 cents on the dollar.
I do think there’s an element of being misled, but less so than there used to be. We’ve now had twenty plus years of industry veterans grumbling on the internet about being screwed by equity. The info is out there.
Sometimes people just want to roll the dice. It isn’t up to us to tell them they can’t want that.
The other option is to work at a public company, where stock is liquid.
They aren't really comparable, and a preference for one or the other is personal choice. Both are correct answers.
Now if your pay is 25% down, you paid 25% of your salary for those options.. +/- a slightly different lifestyle and feel for the company, which is interesting to many.
In contrast, a true and immediate equity grant is becoming an investor.
People like to fuzz these concepts but they are different in principle.