My experience in startups is quite limited, it is some 5-6 friends who applied early on worked and got disappointed. It seems to me that if you are not a founding member, even if the startup makes it through (against quite bad odds), you don't get rewarded enough for working quite a lot for a low salary. Even in one case a friend of mine who came up with quite a good idea that was useful to the company got sacked later on without a second thought or a thank you, let alone a share or a bonus (because of bad financial situation). Also the politics drama (that is abundant in academia yes) also exists for startups on a higher level. Where there are rich shareholders and funders, you are always at the whim of politics between people. Many startups go under because of political decisions by shareholders to stop supporting a certain sector (or even a shareholder being assassinated during some sort of gun fight, in Canada, yea this is a real experience). So that is not special to academia, politics unfortunately exists in any place humans do. It is surprising that it is also so entrenched in academia but yes it is.

Proposals, oh man, nowadays that is the same level of bullshitting involved in AI determined industry interviews, I completely agree. However, if your group is of medium+ size and your PI has some sanity, then odds are you have some project administrator that writes the proposals mostly but I do realize that is not the generality in research groups.