Do people not realize that leave benefits are necessary if you wish to attract high skill workers?

The premise, however, is wrong. The best workers in any field are not employees.

These benefits must necessarily cause at least one, but often more than one of:

- increase in product price

- decrease in product quality

- decrease in liquid compensation

- decrease in profit margins

For those that argue along the lines of "profit margins ought to be reduced" should also take into account that the profit margins are already often set as low as possible by the nature of market competition, so there's often not a lot to work with. Most companies globally don't get the luxury of holding everything constant but cutting costs of goods sold like we do in software because most companies don't catastrophically overspend in costs of goods sold like we do.

There is evidence indicating that to be the case, yes.