No statistics on the sourced article, just a bunch of anthropologists' interviews with teenagers that cannot simply explain the whole of this situation. Eternal September has seemed to sweep HN with this garbage somehow making it to the top.
I think you're still missing the definition of the startup in your reasoning. Starbucks wasn't a startup, and their intention probably wasn't to be the biggest coffee shop chain in the world when they first started. Startups by definition are looking for extreme growth and want to be the biggest "X" of their industry eventually from the getgo. An informed deduction is that you shouldn't make a product that doesn't solve a good large problem if you are a conventional startup.