> but many of said startups will fail due to said choices. So by the time you have a viable company making good money, the really badly aligned companies are gone.

I wish that was the case, but that isn't how startups fail generally, sure very bad user facing breaches could cause something like that, but lots of platforms with too much jank have somehow survived all of these cyber vulnerabilities before, and will probably keep at it.

For a majority startups it's about connections and relationships rather than competence. Very few even consider building actually useful products to be a priority after the initial work of building it.