If the only alternative being considered is for founders to sell their existing shares, yes.

But other approaches to limiting founder dilution and rewarding early shareholders could have included new offsetting stock awards to key staff, or selling even more shares to pay bonuses taxed at ordinary income rates. Those could have been more dilutive to smaller shareholders than this dividend approach.

Dividends are legal, tax-favored, and exist to reward actual shareholders-of-record (even though they're rarely used at this growth-needing-capital stage). Closing that alternative wouldn't necessarily benefit the employee-optionholder 'little guy'... but it might benefit the new-money sophisticated investors who would then have more control.