I think the way we can summarize exactly what you said as:

Selling labor on the labor market, well, you can just go find whatever offer is on the labor market (e.g., your first five paragraphs)

You had to beat out a bunch of other people and get rejected twice in order to go the startup route. However, I think you are mistaking hard work and low pay for risk in this transaction.

There's no risk because, like you said, "I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily." You can always go back to selling your labor on the market.

You aren't risking any personal property or savings. A college student is also living on ramen and giving up nights and weekends, but they are actually taking a bigger risk than a VC founder by paying tuition to the school.

What is happening here is that VCs/incubators are using scarcity as a quality filter since they're trying to buy good ideas/stake in early stage companies and dangle the founders' lottery ticket/casino jackpot to buy those ideas.

I think that startup founders are in weird sandwich between being exploited by VCs in the worst case and being unfairly over-compensated by them in the best case. I'm sure many of your early employees also worked nights and weekends just like you did, but they have less of an ownership stake than founders do.

Maybe the founder's scenario is similar to an NFL player, where average players have short careers and are left with broken bodies and dreams, while the star quarterbacks leave as billionaires. This is why the NFL has a players union.