I think they understand their business well, but I'm not sure if they understand market salaries well, given that our culture is notoriously opaque about salaries and one would hope that senior leadership at GitLab is not in the habit of applying to individual-contributor jobs at other companies to get a sense of what offers look like. That means that hearing people complain about their pay bands is probably one of the only good ways for them to get information about whether they're significantly below market or not - as I mentioned in another comment, I just didn't bother applying to GitLab because they were so far below what I could get elsewhere, so they have no information from their normal HR process that I even exist, let alone what a competitive salary for me would be. Once they have that information, then yes, I trust them to make decisions that are good for their business (I wanted to work there, after all!), but I still think that it's appropriate for users to express opinions if we think they're making poor decisions.