It might be a bigger thing in my field. People go work for security companies (and security software companies) because they're interested in the problem space. The stuff the work on in their spare time might not be directly related to their day job, but it's likely to be related to security. People get in trouble over this stuff --- or, more frequently, have to abandon side projects they worked on at their previous employer.
But I mean, it's obvious, right, that not all these issues have to be universal for them to be nucleation points for organizing? As has been photographically established downthread, I don't much care about open offices right now. But I would not be shocked to see a team of developers organizing around getting quiet offices for their startup.
I didn't mean it as some rebuttal to your overall argument - I'm pretty sympathetic to it, for what it's worth. But you did put 'IP contracts' at the top of your chant and then used it as an example of something universal. It seems to have generated a lot of pushback, as well.
My just-so-story understanding of this stuff - if you are a full-time employee in some brainy job, your employer does have some sort of non-zero claim to some kinds of your intellectual output, even when you're not on the clock. To disambiguate this, a standard approach is to let the employer own everything while making it easy for the employee to explicitly exempt personal projects. The onerous-sounding AoI comes with an escape clause and the understanding the employer isn't going to be a butthead about letting the employee use it and that's pretty much exactly how it works out. That way, as your career takes you from a kitten subscription service to a dev tools vendor to Unicron, your npm packages for Pokemon eugenics optimization stay yours.
I can totally see how this might not work that well if you're a specialist in a specialized and funky field like security or how such agreements might seem like utterly evil overreach if you're reading about them on HN from your digital nomad space van parked in Auerbach in der Oberpfalz. But as a general [US/software/SFBA/etc] thing, they don't feel like a top-of-the-list issue.
But I mean, it's obvious, right, that not all these issues have to be universal for them to be nucleation points for organizing? As has been photographically established downthread, I don't much care about open offices right now. But I would not be shocked to see a team of developers organizing around getting quiet offices for their startup.