> (see Tyranny of Structurelessness, etc.) so I am also skeptical that a company may have continued with this practice

I have always been disappointed with people making claims that explicitly imposed bad hierarchy is inevitable, because of a vague complaint about implicit hierarchy.

It feels like they are using this to justify imposing a bad hierarchy from the top down, for the benefit of the people at the top of said imposed hierarchy. Like when you have a well-functioning team with a very weak explicit hierarchy, and the people at the top introduce a bunch of bad managers. They will tell you it was inevitable. There's no way the thing you saw working well could continue to work well. Because that lack of bad managers was actually working just as poorly, you see. In fact it was much worse.

I don't think that's people who refer to Tyranny of Structurelessness mean.

At least I read it more as that you can't just declare 'there be no hierarchy here' and be done. Unless you carefully engineer the system, the implicit hierarchy will reclaim the void and, all else equal, an implicit hierarchy is harder to undo because it isn't supposed to exist.

In political terms: if all you do is kick the ruler out, you may get a corrupt patronage network instead of democracy. Actual equality doesn't come from just the absence of strong explicit hierarchy; it requires proper institutional design.