How easy is it to avoid "Little Dictators" as bosses?

In a conversation over at Contrary Brin I am having some fun defending an unpleasant notion that can be summarized roughly as follows.

Do we have to suffer rapacious monsters as bosses to gain the benefits of our relatively open society?

My position is roughly this.

Yes we do, but we can use a cocktail medicine approach to mitigate harms.

So... a reasonable debate can be had regarding counter arguments and refuting of any evidence I might offer. These could range from "There is a better way" to "The benefits you imagine aren't there or don't justify the harms."

To shore up my argument, I want to present evidence that we have way fewer rapacious monsters as bosses we can't avoid. That these people exist is a given, but anyone with options regarding employers can turn that into options to avoid nasty bosses. They may not want to quit, but it is an option for them. That's a point I want to leverage in my argument, but my friends will challenge the details, so I can't just toss an assertion into the discussion without them calling me on that.

So... I hit the US Census data and looked for how many "employers" there are in the US, how many people they employ, and how big their payroll is. I didn't need real fine detail, though. For example, in the 2021 data there were roughly six million people employed by tiny groups of four or less with a total payroll near $344B and employed about 6.2 million. Units with 20-24 people had a total payroll near $142B and employed about 2 million. I was a little confused on their distinction between firms and establishments, but I didn't really care since 6.2 million people in groups of 0-4 is a whole lot of groups which means a whole lot of bosses with few to boss around.

I expected a power law curve for the total number of employees compared to employer size and that's roughly true until one gets down to the very tiny groups. Turns out a whole lot of us are employed by very tiny groups and that should not have surprised me. My dentist operates through a "professional" company that likely employs three if you include him. A whole lot of professionals operate at the very small end of the scale and wind up employing an outsized number of us. What was most interesting, however, was that units with fewer than 40 people employ almost as many of us as units with more than 20,000. The big companies/agencies will have lots of line managers, but few CEO's and it's really the CEO count I want.