I agree with you, but everything you say about SEO can be said of PR. The difference is that PR is a more mature field and people understand what it's about.

It probably also helps that few have the attitude that they are entitled to news coverage the same way they feel entitled to traffic. So we accept that it's capricious and that someone who knows what they're doing can get results. And that's OK.

Anyway, who cares about "blind SEO hate on a start-up site?" It ultimately gets punished by the market.

If you hate SEO, great. Make your site hard to crawl chock full of duplicate content and inscrutable urls; don't bother to get authority signals (links) deep and wide; don't make pages that satisfy search intent.

Your competitor who DOES will get traction, funding, a better team, and down the road you'll be yet another guy at a bar saying, "Yeah, I used to have a startup... tough racket."