If you have a working product and ideally money coming in, the early negotiation leverage changes dramatically. You can skip the seed round entirely, because you've already seeded the project. You can usually get a very good valuation on Series A, since your metrics look great and every VC wants a piece of you. You can negotiate to give away very low equity stakes in later rounds, since at that point you seem like a sure thing.
The flip side is that most side projects don't go anywhere. You need to be both very dedicated and very lucky to strike it big without investment.
When it comes to shares "ownership" does not directly correlate with "control".
Well, if that CEO puts up 51% of the capital that might happen. But otherwise the better formula is to be equals as co-founders.
If co-founders are ganging up against each other then that may not be a stable founding team.
Decision paralysis is more a function of not having a clear path forward or having founders without aligned goals than anything else and those are serious problems that need to be dealt with but they do not need to be dealt with on an equity level.
It's much more to do with knowing which role fits you best.
Keep in mind that the CEO functions at the pleasure of the board if you have one and the stockholders if you do not and unless you plan on doing stuff that will go directly against the interest of other shareholders having control is rarely if ever important.
Far more important than the CEO having a controlling percentage of the equity is that the founders have a controlling percentage (and if possible, a supermajority depending on your articles of incorporation and shareholder agreements and whether or not you have more than one class of stock).