My first job as a SWE was for a small startup in NJ (just outside of NY) for ~$50k/year. This was not even an area with a low cost of living.
The unfortunate truth is an employer will pay you the minimum they think you think you're worth if, and only if, that's above what they think you're worth.
Within 6 months I told my boss I wanted a performance review and I got a 50% raise (to ~80k) because my performance well exceeded the perceived performance at my original hiring.
Now that I'm more "senior", something else that I've realized is that hiring an engineer who has been around the block and has a wide breath of knowledge is a much larger force multiplier than hiring 20 engineers and having them scramble. When I look for my next gig some time in the future I'm not going to be pitching myself as solving just their technical challenges anymore. The business case will be "Not only have I solved the problems you're having currently, I've also failed at solving them. I know all the footguns of team leadership and technical stacks. If you want to spend your money efficiently and converge on a solution to your business and organizational problems I can help you get there... for a modest fee"
That is how you make a business person think you're worth your salt because, despite it not being true, "anyone can code" is a common sentiment among that crowd.
I was one of these for many years in the late 2000s when I first started using Hacker News. One of the things that I think people in the Hacker News bubble seem to miss is that programming/software engineering is a passion for some and just a paycheck to others. There are a lot of fields where a job being just a paycheck to you aren't looked down on - a lot of people in the Hacker News bubble look down on that. My work at that company was just a paycheck while I gained skills on the weekends and eventually started my own consulting company. I credit reading Hacker News for showing me that the best way to start a company is, well, to just do it.
I worked for a company that needed a developer to keep their pile of ETL logic and server code working as the data formats they acquired from various government agencies and the requirements of their downstream customers changed. I joined right out of college with a salary during my first three months of $48k with the understanding that it would be increased after the first three months - it eventually settled at $56k for the first year. It was a small company that fluctuated between 3 and 8 full-time employees, not counting management. I made a respectable living during the recession in 2008 because my work still made the company money - I was the only full time programmer there at the time. My ending salary with the company in the mid 2010s was $72,000 in a large south-eastern city where that was above the average salary in the area - in line with CoL.
The flipside of making money in a recession when there are still paying clients is when the business loses out on a major contract to a competitor when there's no recession on. Despite riding out the entire recession (with only a small cut to salary due to a four day work-week instead of a five day work-week), the loss of a major contract by my employer meant that the previously stable funding source that allowed me to continue working dried up there. Less than a month after that I was let go, and had to move cross-country to find stable employment as a software contractor. I eventually joined that company full time and my consulting activities have slowed down significantly.
More to the question of this topic - after they let me go, they had two people at the company - the owner, who was the president of the company, and the owner's wife, who was the business manager. The president of the company, who was previously my boss, started maintaining the things I worked on, and offered me some 1099 remote consulting work when occasionally overwhelmed as a way to pick up some of the slack. That's how his small business handled having a software engineer when needed - occasional contracts to fill the hole.
Generally, SMBs don’t hire software engineers at all unless they’re in the business of making and selling software. Smaller software engineering tasks are contracted out to vendors and custom software shops that may already have similar products that can be adapted to a customer’s needs rather than developed from the ground up. The high software engineer salaries force a sort of efficiency on the market.
Smaller startups that want to develop software might offer engineers some ownership of the company, or additional perks like remote work and shorter hours to attract them to jobs that don’t pay the highest software engineering salaries.
There are also many junior developers outside of big cities who have salaries more in line with the $60K range you listed. These are not talked about often on HN but they exist.