Completely spot on from my personal experience. FWIW, I have seen this in every startup I've joined.
Been in a few places that turned the cargo cult to eleven. Someone brings an article about squads at Spotify and suddenly the team hierarchy changes. Someone discovers a blogpost about how desks on Amazon were made out of doors in the early days and suddenly all new desks are made of doors. Google releases Material design and we have to redesign the whole thing. And there’s also the playground slide and the plastic ball pool.
I recently quit a job, without another lined up, at a startup where I couldn't even last a year. The CTO and the entire engineering management layer under him were all friends from high school.