Yet, in any thread where Greece, Puerto Rico, etc come up there's this strong backlash against defaulting as being somehow immoral (as though it's not written into the lending agreements). What exactly is the difference between burning a bunch of VC money then shutting down and defaulting on a loan? In both cases we have an institution putting money at risk in the hopes of making a profit, and then losing it. I don't see the big moral difference here.
I don't subscribe to the notion that "bankruptcy is immoral", it's just a business transaction within the established framework with checks and balances in place.
That said though - situation with startups and business development loans in general is a little different because startups are by definition attempting to turn the idea they present to investors into reality with investors' money. So unless they fail because of a blatant mismanagement of funds (which does happen of course) - in a typical startup failure situation where something is built but there's no more runway and no more money coming in and no buyers to take over the operation - this just feels like it's easier to justify the less negative vibe around that situation.
Multi-billion dollar governments go bankrupt because of mis-management. Less "Uber For Dogs" and more "Enron", minus the intentional criminality. Governments go bankrupt because its citizen "shareholders" vote for continued debt accrual and negative EBITA. But citizens don't care. It's OPM: Other People's Money. Since they're also "customers", their goal is to get as much possible out.
The other point is (arguably) that government should not be risking bankruptcy for the sake of innovation. Which in the cases of government bankruptcy, was not the reason for insolvency anyway. So then it comes back to mismanagement, where maybe the better analog is personal bankruptcy. If an individual came to you and said they were declaring bankruptcy because they had spent more than they made for the last 20 years, you probably wouldn't have much sympathy.
But it seems like it would honestly be the opposite (i.e., government bankruptcy being bad). The more people that are involved, the higher chance there is of a tragedy of the commons
Interesting to note on the corporate angle, bankruptcy laws are a fairly-recent invention. (Where by "fairly recent" I mean "several centuries".) The US's laws, in particular, are credited with fostering some of the innovation in this country, as they reduce the impacts of failure.