True, but probably not billions in near-poverty as software engineers. The world standard for software engineers is probably an ok life.

Point is, by international standards, USD $170k is a very high salary for software engineers too, even for a specialist.

I know a guy who outsourced some stuff to a dev in Nepal. The guy was making 3x the average for his area.

SWE is highly paid throughout the world, but I have noticed there are some geographic areas where it actually doesn't seem to command a higher salary than average.

Salaries are driven by a lot of supply side dynamics, it's less about the overall economic output of the employee and more about the cost of replacing them.