Since the enormous vast majority of people only have experience working in companies that would never (and definitely have never) tried a flat organizational st

Since the enormous vast majority of people only have experience working in companies that would never (and definitely have never) tried a flat organizational structure, I think this is kind of a disingenuous statement. From the outside those companies do look like far outliers. But I have a suspicion that hierarchy is only extremely relevant without technology. What I mean here is that technology is a great organizational "flattener" and I think since technology like this is still in its infancy, we can't really make a blanket statement like "this is very hard to achieve". Obviously, you're right to some degree, but I think that is only an artifact of technology not yet having revolutionized "the organization".