That’s true. Before coming to AWS I worked as a senior dev/de facto “cloud architect” (in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king) for a 60 person company where we had 5 weeks vacation and free family healthcare. I could basically get anything I wanted pushed through and the CTO trusted my judgement implicitly.

When they got bought out for 10x revenue (I had already left), the founders gave each of the employees an extra bonus and they reached out to a former employee who had been there for years and gave him a bonus on top of the options he exercised - they had no legal obligation to do so.

But, they didn’t and couldn’t give me the 50% bump in compensation I make now and working remotely (permanently).

Indeed, I've found that money allows people to justify much.