The fact that you assign innovation purely to science/engineering is why many startups fail. You don't seem to recognize that innovation happens across all segments of the business. Plenty of ingenious products never reach critical mass because engineering founders dismiss all other aspects of business building. Facebook's toe-hold that helped them beat MySpace and Friendster wasn't an act of innovative engineering as much as it was their go-to-market plan starting in Universities.

Engineering will remain flexible because of all the virtue signaling big tech is doing in order to retain their talent. It's almost comical that they are struggling to bring people back to the office after being the biggest promotor of work-remote while the rest of the service-economy had to show up every day to their Walmart jobs...

This is a pretty odd comment given that I EXPLICITLY mention science, engineering, and innovation as three separate categories.

Look at how I used the slashes in the earlier part of that science ("sales/marketing"). Do you think I think that sales and marketing are the same thing? If not, why would you think that I think engineering = innovation? It's the exact same grammatical structure.

What I did say is that an NFT startup probably isn't doing anything innovative, and also is probably doing mostly sales and marketing, and that this combination of factors means that their in-person stance makes sense. I stand by that. My mental image of an NFT startup is that it's a boiler room of the sort that pump-and-dumped penny stocks in the 90s. That type of work benefits from rapid feedback loops among staff. The boiler room structure makes sense for a business trying to generate revenue from the NFT ecosystem.

The rest of your post is an odd rant that has almost nothing to do with how I think about businesses or the world. It's not even a strawman... just kind of a completely off topic rant from my perspective.

I have no idea what stereotype you're projecting onto me, but I'm not even an engineer.