as a business that has to turn a profit, of course you will not pay significantly more than you have to. Base Salaries are demand and supply driven which also means that if i can pay more, i can also get more skilled/experienced people for that money.
So you're basically paying what everyone else is paying (on aggregate) rather than figuring out yourself if SREs and developers are worth to you as a company. This seems like a lazy-ish approach to me and negates most of the positivity that salary transparency has.
I realize though that you're never going to find an approach that satisfies everyone, so maybe this one works well for you (StackOverflow is an awesome site!).
> The same benefits, equipment, remote work, autonomy, opportunities to speak and contribute to open source, etc are the same.
That is tautological, "the same benefits are the same". $11k buys a lot of extra "benefits" in the world.