Yeah, the worst thing of all is when you have a small company that doesn't actually need that much coordination overhead aping it from the larger companies. Spending 2 hours a day in meetings and complicated performance calibration processes is an unfortunate necessity of working with a few thousand other people; you eat the cost because it's the only way to actually get thousands of person-years of useful work done each year.
But if you're a 10-100 person company and most people are spending 25-50% of their workday on coordination and process, you're probably paying the same cost for no actual gain.
Tinfoil hat opinion: maybe FAANGs and other megacorps are happy to lose a few managers to these small companies, so they bring their big corp culture to these companies and bury them with process, risk aversion and meetings before they become a serious competitor?
But if you're a 10-100 person company and most people are spending 25-50% of their workday on coordination and process, you're probably paying the same cost for no actual gain.