You're conflating two very different sources of moral outrage. One is that, prior to investors and founders memorializing their agreement on pro-rata rights in

You're conflating two very different sources of moral outrage. One is that, prior to investors and founders memorializing their agreement on pro-rata rights in a contract, some investors feel like they're entitled to them because they're a standard term. One reason why they're standard is detailed below. The present controversy is that after investors/founders committed to pro-rata rights, later investors convinced founders to not honor those pre-existing commitments. Yes you're investing early, but that's priced into the valuation. Many investors would say "If you're investing and not getting pro-rata rights, the valuation you've negotiated is not a meaningful number, because it can be retroactively renegotiated by parties who do not necessarily have to include you in that conversation. It is thus not conveniently possible to award investors with, nor desirable for investors to seek, an attractive valuation for taking on extra risk by investing early unless that attractive valuation comes with pro-rata rights."