Well and I think you’ve been seeing a lot of it the past couple of years. There’s some natural informal organization if a team is physically collated—which often isn’t the case and can be good or bad in any case. If everyone is remote, a lot of that informal organization doesn’t happen.

It’s also the case that the realty of any established company is budgeting, procurement, etc. There need to be processes. I expect a lot of developers wouldn’t like to spend a day a week on this sort of necessary evil.

My experience with "flat" structures in the past has been the lack of an explicit hierarchy created an implicit hierarchy, which caused compensation to not match actual role and some diabolical politics. Never again. I've kind of moved on to wanting to work at places that run on information and not confidence instead. You can work out which type of place you are at pretty quickly by talking to upper management. Unfortunately most people want confidence and not information.