Think about it from a founder perspective with a bit of reality: who in their right minds would you hire an antagonistic board for the high-minded goal of making corporate governance in America better when you don't even know if your company is going to make another year?
People work for companies for three reasons: mission, people or money. If you enjoy working with the people at your company at least you have that covered. Most corporate companies don't have a real mission people can get behind and money is in the long run for founders.
Tech grows big & fast, and a lot of today's problems can be traced to VC-backed boards noping out of ethical responsibilities.
Startup board members are generally (rightfully) worried about growth or survival, until that's on rails and by then it's too late to fix the monster they've grown.
Today's trends of founder friendliness, wide participation, and big checks makes these trade-offs even more extreme. Startups are so messy that the industry hasn't figured out how to juggle it all yet, or even if the relevant stakeholders even want it to.
That said I don't think it's the boards sole responsibility on ethical choices - that's the management team and rolling up to the board.
It feels a bit how HR is complicit in the company outcome and is a fraught position. The board of directors is the same. Maybe the rest of the world has thought about the board of directors in the wrong way in that they have assumed that they represent an ethical, independent thinking group of people with different incentives then how boards are actually set up.
Not using this as a scape goat of responsibilities but more observing how things seem to be in the real world.
Secondly, independent is not the same as antagonistic.
Where the founder also controls the voting majority of stock, yes, the founder hires the board.
If founder has majority of stocks, he can't be fired.