As the company with equity, any calls you’re selling are guaranteed covered, which hedges against downside loss of having given away equity and it exploding in value. Calls also theoretically align incentives better than equity because it gets the staff member personally interested in seeing the stock rise, rather than just selling immediately to take profit if they’re short your company’s future outlook.
Lots of other nice properties - If you sell the option, either discounted or at some full price, you make a money premium, which helps runway. If the stock falls, you make money from having chosen options and basically don’t have to give the employees anything. If the stock rises, you’re probably making great sums from your (much larger) equity share, and your losses versus just giving them equity are essentially capped at the difference between the current price and strike price, instead of theoretically unlimited cost. This is easily quantified with some multiplication when issuing the options, meaning in a growing company, you have knowably limited exposure, and essentially are just giving them the equity you would’ve given them anyways.