As such it is not surprise things change. You can't go from making less money than you could elsewhere to making a nice income without a lot of office time.
Of course it is common to take the above too far. There is need for office work, but often those office employees forget that it is about the real world.
The alternative here is to hire and train people to spend time in the office, rather than selling the company to someone who will do so. That has its own potential problems, for sure, but getting your soul eaten by VC is not one of them.
I do not recall the book/essay or the original author, but I recall the quote that “everybody has a price they can’t resist, find out that price…”.
If your enthusiasm product is successful and has potential to be milked, someone somewhere will figure out your price and eventually buy you out.
Obviously not all of these are founder centric things but they're all profit driven enterprises. Is it actually just not possible for a typical human to turn down excess profits and take pride in a project rather than a money machine? People seem to think these things used to be better, "no one takes pride in their work anymore", "everything is made to break", etc. What changed?