I just can't believe that this works as seamlessly as the handbook would have you believe. It seems it would create a very Lord Of The Flies/cliquey atmosphere. In a group of people, there always exists some kind of hierarchy, whether it's explicit or implied. In this case, there is zero attempt to create an explicit power structure, so it's 100% implied, but I don't see why that's fundamentally better.

In general this sounds like the natural structure for pack animals, where you join a pack and no one anoints a power structure, but it becomes clear very quickly who is "alpha", "beta", etc. IMHO it sounds like it possibly could be a very stressful situation.