There's the dampening effect of private equity and reputation arbitrage to consider. If you build a company around steadfast refusal to profitmaxx, potential acquirers who are willing to apply these techniques can financially engineer their way to offering you a very, very, very tempting price for it. Your personal convictions will need to be proof against extremely strong financial motivation; and if you have partners or creditors, they'll need to share the same tenacity.

It still does seem like it should be more visible, though. I'm not sure how many good examples there are, if any, of new companies growing to an appreciable size from explicit repudiation of these practices only to then eventually be acquired and gutted. Maybe people who think like this just don't start companies.