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 :-)