Most of the attributes in question (office environment, perks, etc) are just semantics around the product/market. The semantics matter a lot especially when your team is critically dependent on a high-turnover potential staff and require talented smart people to stick with your company, or they need an environment that helps them be creative and think out hard problems.
It's similar to questions of programming language, infrastructure options, etc. They are important supportive aspects to the core business but mostly the core of the business could still operate even if those supportive aspect were mediocre/non-optimal - just not as effectively. On a longer time scale that stuff starts to matter in a highly-competitive market.
Most startups and small businesses don't really have those issues, or at least they aren't critical at that stage of the company when the core business hasn't been figured out. So emulating them at a high cost is a bad idea.
The context of everything is important. Sadly most advice dolled out in business books is extracted and formalized without considering the context of where it worked and why.
It's similar to questions of programming language, infrastructure options, etc. They are important supportive aspects to the core business but mostly the core of the business could still operate even if those supportive aspect were mediocre/non-optimal - just not as effectively. On a longer time scale that stuff starts to matter in a highly-competitive market.
Most startups and small businesses don't really have those issues, or at least they aren't critical at that stage of the company when the core business hasn't been figured out. So emulating them at a high cost is a bad idea.
The context of everything is important. Sadly most advice dolled out in business books is extracted and formalized without considering the context of where it worked and why.