It's not a binary choice.

You can bootstrap until Series A at which point you can decide what direction to go. Either a successful lifestyle business or a bigger VC backed business. But you can't choose if you take YC/Seed.

And you are more likely as a founder to acquire life changing wealth with a lifestyle business than a VC one.

Why can't you choose if you go to YC? Plenty of YC companies have not raised A rounds.

voluntarily not raised A rounds, or been unable to though?

Voluntarily not raised A rounds. What do people think happens if you don't raise after YC? YC isn't a conventional VC firm. They don't take board seats. They don't need you to shoot the moon (they'd like it if you do, but they're not structurally dependent on it). They are in fact pretty chill about you going on to bootstrap after your batch wraps up.

True, but a big reason to use YC is for the fundraising contacts. If you never go to A, you gave away a lot of your company for not a lot of money.

There are tens of thousands of bootstrapped companies that have had 10M "exits" when the founder ultimately decided to sell...after years of profits.

There have only been a few VC backed companies that had billion dollar exits...only a few dozen that have even had profitable exits...which is about the same number of VC backed companies that have actually achieved profitability (but there is little overlap between these two groups)

Bootstrapped companies are more likely to survive, and thrive, than VC-backed companies. You just don't here about them much because they've got realistic business plans, and that's not sexy to read about.