I have worked at startups as well as at Amazon. I would choose Amazon over most startups.

In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is the manager. A good manager can create a great work environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can kill morale regardless of company policy.

I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and well-trained.

Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but also terrible. Some of my startup managers were comically bad. I suspect this was because they were inexperienced. It’s like the difference between parenting your first child versus parenting the third child.