It's not an unreal scenario at all. It's entirely plausible that a company falls apart when lacking the specific motivators and pressures that Jobs brought, and therefore never really exists in the first place. What's unreal about that?

The unreal part is there being only two options. Most dichotomies are false.

I addressed why the hypothetical is limited to two options, and taking a subset of plausible scenarios does not reduce the plausibility of the selected scenarios.

P(a) = 0.1, P(b) = 0.1, P(c) = 0.8, "Oh, let's only look at cases a and b".

Yes, because a and b represent a specific combination I said I was interested in exploring. What you've shown doesn't lower the plausibility of those scenarios. Are you being intentionally contrarian or is there a reason why you are trying to muddy a simple thought experiment?

That makes it unreal. It changed the environment too much to exclude it. Ignoring it breaks stuff. I'm not saying thought experiments are bad — do them often myself — I'm saying my response to get thought experiment itself is: it can't work like that (riffing of an unrelated but recent comment from yesterday where I'm the one doing the thought experiment as an existence proof, it's a "spherical cow in a vacuum" model).

It's not a nonsensical "spherical cow in vacuum" thought experiment to say "Pixar exists but some employees are treated bad" vs "Pixar doesn't exist". If you think that it becomes impossible for a rational mind to weigh those two choices, then there's no point in me continuing this discussion with you.

If Pixar didn't exist, the same people would do the same (or close enough) work under a different brand. Quite possibly with each other. That's as distinct as two identical dice placed in no specific order, i.e. not. Ergo, not a realistic scenario.

No, not at all. Environment and the group of people they’re working with plays an enormous role in the work people do.

Are you claiming that only new grads and immigrants fearful of deportation worked at Pixar?

Depends on how much of Jobs' current reputation is accurate vs. mythologising.

Jobs was a well-known sociopath but also people of the highest talent level fought to work for him because he was a great executive