I feel like there needs to be the analogue of open source licenses for equity offers. Something standardized, so that both employees and management could negotiate in good faith with high confidence that the terms are as advertised.
Because right now, there has been too much innovation in ways to screw over employees and the only reasonable assumption is that equity will vanish.
For some startups (mostly dealing with local and self-hosted software), it may be a better option to offer perpetual license grants to the product being worked on as opposed to equity in the startup itself. This encourages employees to make the best software if they know that they are also going to be the end user as well.
Because right now, there has been too much innovation in ways to screw over employees and the only reasonable assumption is that equity will vanish.