Also, in a remote setting the company saves: Health Insurance Payroll taxes (both company and employee) General benefits (office, stipends, food, etc) Immigration costs (10k+)
Those are all very appealing perks for the employeer.
Parent commenter didn't write "easily attained", so it's bad form to quote it. FAANG companies hire new grads, and when they do you can see from the levels.fyi charts that they're paid around $200k/year or a little below.
I'm a decade out of school and 200k would be life changing for me+family.
I was interviewing for the last few months and got plenty of LeetCode Hard questions. Was designing a time-series database at least three times. And talking about a situation when I had a conflict with my colleague at least five times :-)
The american work culture is among the best: people want to work and want to get paid. Americans tend to be willing to work 40% more for 20% more benefit, something that few places in the world tolerate. This makes for very dynamic workplaces, with a greater sense of purpose and responsibility.
The smaller the company the more intense the responsibility. This does not mean 80hr work weeks (though this exists, I have never faced it) but the base line is much higher.
On financing, it is hard to fathom for engineers outside america really how much money there is in this space. A new grad developer that displays some level of skill can easily get 200k+/yr total compensation offers. Furthermore stock is always one of the biggest compensation factors, where it usually does not exist significantly outside the us. In this bull market, stock compensation is around 60%+ of liquid compensation for public companies. Small companies have a lot of equity to give so you can ask for a lot and you have to be patient for that to pay off. Even the winners can take a decade to IPO or exit.
Americans do think health benefits are very important, but it is mostly a tax benefit. I would only focus on PTO/parental leave if applicable as a remote engineer and forget about all else, pay it out of pocket on your end.