Smart employees understand this dynamic. When leadership hides information - it always means its bad. The first thing I noticed when I had a bout of bad employers was that they claimed "we can't share financial information because of XYZ investor/legal reason."

Those startups all had major financial problems within 6 months to 2 years. Management has strong incentives to hide bad information from employees.

Yep, I've worked at two startups which started to really emphasise The Numbers in weekly all-hands meetings, and how we're all in it together to improve them, etc. Both of those jobs ended in redundancy.