With any form of investor expecting a return I dunno how possible this is, but I’ve worked for one family owned business (non-tech industry but had a small tech team) and it was super relaxed like you mention.

No investors, no board of directors, just a woman and her son who owned the business. They wanted to grow it but were very reasonable about it.

That being said the salary was probably 20-30% below market. At the time I wanted to make more money so I chased that for a while instead.

20-30% lower on a hourly basis or total compensation?

I often find that even investors can be reasonable.

Most of the problems in tech are of the employees own creation. Unreasonable requirements and unreasonable timelines, often coming out of thin air for no reason other than some middle manager's political interests.

It is super hard to fight against it, and it's even harder to demonstrate how forcing tech to work more than necessary is bad for business.

Small businesses deal with it by being small. Big companies are just chaotic complex systems where you don't have much of a choice.

I’ve heard similar stories, but I think they tend to have some runaway hit cash cow in their rearview enabling it.

Companies that can kind of do anything and it’s fine. Like Google with AdWords. Whatever they do, AdWords goes to work every day and pays the bills.

Other companies get high on their own supply and invent things like “Holocracy” and claim it is responsible for their success.