By the way, I was actually describing an extremely successful 20-25 person company.
Working for yourself can work out very well, or it can leave you re-applying for your old job, 3 years older and 10 years smarter, and you know as well as I do that being 10 years smarter just makes institutionalized life harder.
You can stay corporate and not lose your edge entirely. Obviously, it'd be better to work for yourself and not have to serve 2 masters, but few people have the resources for that. To do it, you have to learn how to be insubordinate enough to keep your creativity, without getting fired. That's not actually hard, if you stay out of the politics. Old Me would react to a pernicious inefficiency by speaking up and loudly, unwittingly walking into a political minefield. ("This is damaging my productivity, you idiots!") New Me says, "This is mildly annoying and reducing my productivity, but that gives me time for Coursera."
To quote the asian guy from Tokyo Drift "Life is simple - you make choices and never look back"
Sometimes you have to act subordinate, while keeping your poise. Play the character, do the role well, but never actually be subordinate. Always keep your own career goals (knowledge, contacts, credibility) in mind and protect them, because corporate incoherence will assault your goals from all sides. It's rare that anyone will look out for you, and usually managers can't (that's called "playing favorites") so you have to do that for yourself. Your real boss is someone you can't get away from but who can't fire you: it's you.
It truly helps you read some situations as one does act differently when a high or low status is assigned to you, it is striking how it affects behaviour, both in the game and when applied to real life.
Not that I disagree with you, but even in companies of the same size, there is a huge range in strategies and outcomes for those involved. Small "family style" businesses operate under a very different model from VC-funded start-ups even though they are the same size.
At a company where I've worked, titles were completely 100% nominal and a few years in, what you were doing often had almost nothing to do with what you were hired for.