Assuming the founders held 30%, the employee equity was 1/30,000th that of founders. I don't understand how engineers are ok with their boss getting 30,000X their compensation.
But the Silicon Valley mold is: a couple of guys quit their jobs, hit up VCs for a month or two with the roughest sketch of an idea, get funded, and hire their first employee a couple of weeks later. That employee gets maybe 1% maximum, or the order of 1/50th or less of what the founders. Meanwhile, the engineer will bust his ass, show up at work every day and code some more at night, debug on weekends, etc. "We're all in this together, team!"
Then on the happy day years later, the founders start pricing out their MacLarens, while the engineers blink "WTF" at their actual payout.
So, if you get paid a market salary and benefits, you can't really expect to own much of the company that's providing you with that salary and benefits as it's essentially burning money on you. If you came in and said "can I get 1% ownership if I take 15k a year with no benefits" that would be a different story, but that's not how this works.
If the last priced round made that 1% worth $20M on paper, then that's unreasonable.