It changes with age. Men in their teens/twenties are followers, by your mid-thirties you start to question things.

I'm past 40 and I see this in my workplace. All my colleagues who work long hours are in their 20s, particularly the fresh graduates who just joined. I try to gently tell them that they can just work their 7.5 hours per day and go home like us old guys, but they seem determined to burn the candle at both ends. Ah well, they'll learn - when they burn out.

Pretty sure that the rebellion starts in the teens, source: myself, all my friends and now my friends children.

These days the rebellion starts from kindergarten apparently. There needs to be balance between understanding and respecting tradition, and questioning it. On one end you have Iran/Taliban, on the other you have modern USA. Galileo was right, and his persecutors were right too.

Yes, but this rebellion is against the PARENTS. Teenage kids typically seek for the new meaning and purpose in their lives, that's why so many college students join charities, or civil rights groups, or cults... And they do not join those groups as leaders, they start at the bottom.

The military is a rather specialized scenario. "At-will employment", it's not.

Militaries that rely on volunteers rather than conscription absolutely don't get away with being completely authoritarian and treating regular soldiers terribly. They have to form a social contract of sorts, where people put up with some loss of autonomy in specific areas in return for other benefits like education or training, autonomy in other areas they might value more (like small team leadership), and decent service conditions. No service members tolerate regular and capricious abuse, and leaders found to do that seldom remain in post long. It's not a perfect system of course, but abusive behaviour by leadership is definitely the exception.

Issues around service conditions regularly go all the way to Congress and get resolved quickly and sometimes expensively, because the alternative is being unable to recruit or retain personnel, and that would be disastrous for a military that's already having a tough time doing both.

Let's not justify abusive leadership. There's never a need for it.

We're _aware_ of that, but the past forty or so years of software development have been extremely anti-hierarchical - or the "hierarchy of one" / "benevolent dictator for life" flat structure.

Hierarchy has its own failure modes. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred ..

We may have it easy compared to the military, but then, we didn't join the military.

Also, militaries do have to care about what the lowest ranks think. Not only to maintain recruiting in places without conscription, but also to avoid fragging in places that do have conscription:

"""Fragging is the deliberate or attempted killing by a soldier of a fellow soldier, usually a superior. U.S. military personnel coined the word during the Vietnam War, when such killings were most often attempted with a fragmentation grenade,[2]

…

The high number of fragging incidents in the latter years of the Vietnam War was symptomatic of the unpopularity of the war with the American public and the breakdown of discipline in the U.S. Armed Forces. Documented and suspected fragging incidents totalled nearly nine hundred from 1969 to 1972.[5]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging

While I am confident that Musk's behaviour is merely close to average USA industrial employment norms and this is just us techies being shocked by what that looks like (for example, while there are stories about Amazon running out of people interested in working there, I've not heard that about Tesla, SpaceX, TBC, or Neuralink), this latter scenario is one of the possible failure modes I foresee with actually trying to colonise Mars with Starship, as there just isn't an easy way out if/when things go wrong 40 million miles from alternative employment/governance.