This article is showing an important lesson: no matter how valuable you are as an IC, changing the culture at a toxic company is very difficult alone. The one thing that has been proven to work for these situations is collective action by employees. One IC is replaceable, a team of ICs quitting is a disaster, the threat of such action is enough to make any manager/director shit their pants. You don't even have to come out guns blazing and do a full union right away, creating a simple demand on paper with all members of a team signing that demand is often enough to make management scared.