Are you accounting for the benefit to workers of not having (some) authority? Decision-making itself can be extremely stressful! Ceding authority to someone else also relieves you of the associated responsibility and that can and probably does have significant benefits e.g., psychologically, emotionally.

Consider a pretty analogous industry – musicians, musical artists, etc. I've noticed that a lot of 'bands' I like are really 'dictatorships' run by a single highly-motivated artist that recruits other musicians to act as 'employees' to realize their, the dictator's, vision. It doesn't seem inherently bad to allow people to be employees.

Regardless, it seems impossibly to perfectly negate any advantages (or disadvantages) of "exploiting workers". I think a better vision is to help and encourage everyone to become more 'powerful', e.g. more skilled, wealthier, open to more possibilities. But I also admit I don't have a plan to prevent the already-powerful from becoming more powerful themselves, and at a faster rate than everyone else. I'm still undecided whether that's generally good or bad. Perhaps it's (effectively) undecidable!

I agree. IMO, the problem is not that companies aren't made of equals. Hierarchies serve a valuable function. The problem is that the lower bound of how much the bottom of the hierarchy can be abused is far too low. I don't think we need to abolish hierarchies - just raise the floor.

Isn't it more of a game theory situation? If your competitors exploit their workers and you don't then you will be too expensive?

Yes. That's exactly what I meant by referring to competitive advantage.