Outside of a very senior employee #1, I think the point is that even achieving a unicorn valuation does not guarantee extremely early employees much wealth, at least more than you'd get going down a more traditional big co path.
If you are picking lottery tickets I would agree with you. What I think the point of the article is, is that investors aren’t picking lottery tickets and neither should you. Given 1000 startups to choose from, your EV is negative as compared to working for BigCo. You can’t work for 1000 startups, though, and investors don’t invest in every startup asking for money either. They’re selective and expect that this process will result in positive returns over simply putting the cash in public tech stocks.
Can you narrow 1000 companies down to 20 that have a better than average chance of success? Sure you can! And you should, and you shouldn’t treat the options as worthless.