Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco or Silicon Valley but still the group somehow want to have Silicon Valley salaries. Why use the most expensive place on earth as a benchmark?

Presumably because that is the alternative, requiring sufficient incentive to stay away from the alternative? It is not like you need to live in SV to work in SV.

That's TC though, can't think of a company that pays this much in base.

130k base salary is comparable to a new grad or mid level SWE in the bay.

For many companies, that TC is very liquid. Some don't even have 1-yr cliffs anymore and tech stocks aren't exactly hurting these days.