I disagree with your advice. I work for a small business for over 5 years. Yeah, it has different vibes, sometimes we are cutting corners, or I have to touch frontend, backend and devops in the same day, but people in this company are amazing (almost everyone was hired because they knew someone already working for the company), my boss can appreciate good work and it's never expected to work overtime (excluding when our servers are down, but we almost never have such crisis). And, the best part - I was never hired to be a programmer, but to do some mundane excel work. I wanted to help, they gave me a chance and 5 years later I'm responsible for entire backend of this company. So my advice - never say never, always try to evaluate individually.
I feel exactly the opposite: "never work for corporations unless they're paying really crazy money". With small companies there's everything, some are bad, some are great, there's a variety to choose from. Corporations are all the same: office politics, "company culture", pointless meetings, even more pointless HR people trying to artificially validate their existence, shifting of focus on passing the evaluations rather than getting work done, etc.
cute citation but it is a sweeping generalization. There are plenty of small businesses that take care of their employees. Yes they have challenges but so does large businesses and "unicorns". There is no perfect business to work for. You just need to avoid shitty ones and especially shitty bosses/managers.
