I feel like Metas 'flatness' is revealing itself as suboptimal now that its stock is tanking. While the product is generating money and productivity doesn't really matter, the organization can afford to have masses of engineers doing not much of anything. But when things are going bad and clear top down organization is needed, then this culture suddenly turns into massive friction and might end up killing the company.
I don't claim to understand corporate structures or the best way to organize a large group of employees but metas problems seem to stem more from betting on the wrong thing which seemed like a decision that came from the top.
Top down organisation is slow, bureaucratic, and often is bottlenecked for decisions. Inevitably, unless you have monopoly or other form of stickiness, you are quickly outcompeted by the newer nimble organisation. (Hence why companies spend a lot on the stickiness aspect, e.g. Word proprietary format)
Not saying that “flat” works better (or scales). What does work better (with some other downsides) is a distributed system of companies (each internal company operating independently). Still lots of politics around getting the “budget”, still plenty of places to fall down with cross cutting concerns and integrations. Much like a microservice arch vs a monolith, the trade offs can be beneficial at scale.
