Well as you said, no, is it better to have a company valued $50M growing 30% per year, or having $50M in your bank account ? Most entrepreneur will prefer the latter
I think you have that backwards, Google kept asking Yahoo to buy them [1]
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-...
The early 1998 $1 million offer was prompted by Larry Page and Yahoo rejected him. However, the 2002 offer of $3 billion was from Yahoo and Google rejected them. In 2002, Google was already starting to see profits so they were under no pressure to sell.
"In 2002, Yahoo's CEO at the time, Terry Semel, engaged in negotiations to acquire Google, which lasted several months.
The outcome of the negotiation was Semel balking at Google's price tag of $5 billion."
The part missing from your hypothetical scenario is that founders have egos and many would rather keep ownership of their company and don't want to work for someone else. (I made previous comment about this.[0])
Yahoo made offers to buy Google and Facebook but we obviously know that Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg did not become employees of Yahoo reporting to their boss Jerry Yang. They said "no sale".
In Facebook's case of being the buyer, Kevin Systrom of Instragram said "yes" to Zuckerberg but Ev Williams of Twitter said "no".[1]
If you're a founder of a successful startup and Autodesk/Facebook/Google come calling with an offer of (m|b)illions to buy your company, you can listen to them but you don't have to sell.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419098
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/04/the-three-reasons-twitter-...