It did none of those things. It was cheaper and had lower deductibles for young families with practically no prior exposure to the health system. But if you were older, or were a woman who had ever seen a reproductive health specialist, or had at any point in your past had an unexplained seizure, or had reported any of a constellation of 10 different symptoms predictive of a future diabetic condition (and so and so forth), the California individual market provided literally no value at all, because you were locked out of it: insurance wasn't available to you outside the group market
at any price.
It's easy for insurers to provide incredibly cheap premiums when they can exclude broad classes of customers on the suspicion that they will in the future make claims.
It's also easy for insurers to provide incredibly cheap premiums when they can quietly impose low annual and lifetime caps on coverage, which they could and did before the ACA.
It's also easy for insurers to provide those cheap premiums when they can re-evaluate your coverage and rescind it retroactively when you're diagnosed with a chronic condition, which they could and did before the ACA.
My point is simple: you're not comparing apples and oranges. You need to compare the small group market to the post-ACA individual market if you want to compare like with like. The system you're comparing it to now was exploiting consumers; you were a beneficiary of it, I agree, but your benefits came at others expense.
More importantly, though, outside the moral dimension: as soon as you got your company off the ground and had to begin providing for employees, you'd have found yourself in the same situation you are now: with annual double digit increases in premiums. Because that's where most of us were prior to the ACA.