Equity is a lottery ticket. Is sacrificing my happiness or life balance in the near term worth the gamble that A) my company will be successful, and B) that my equity won’t have been diluted to worthlessness by the time that happens? At higher levels of seniority/importamce/influence this might make sense, but for most people I seriously doubt it does, especially early in their careers.

As a non-founder / not a VC you max get a few percentage points, and its mostly paper toilet money until there's an exit or IPO, and the founders will always try to squeeze you if they can, not because they're bad people, but because the system incentivises it. (you'll keep getting diluted in future rounds)

tbh, if im gonna bust my ass I'd rather own the thing.

A recent job offer for a startup was a 5 year vest with a 2 year cliff. Seriously?

That doesn’t happen anywhere outside of Silicon Valley.

And even in Silicon Valley you get the survivor ship bias of the 1% of companies getting to IPO and making their employees decent exit stories...

99% of startups die off worthless and your equity never realises.