I couldn't accept the job and look myself in the mirror while knowing that not only do my direct reports struggle to get by, can't save for retirement, but that I'm one of the only employees in the country who doesn't even have to care enough to pay FICA taxes.
With finance or ad-tech like you are recommending the whole output of the job is often zero or negative sum. That can happen in academia as well but it seems less likely.
If you moved money from a sinkhole garbage establishment project to some other promising scientific endeavors, that would almost certainly be a net positive for the world even if the total spend is the same and you "just pushed money around". A similar principle applies when considering many industry investment decisions.
Regardless, "finance" is broad as hell and there are a huge number of potentially well-paying careers that are not finance nor ad-tech. Not to mention that a FIRE research scientist who is less beholden to the current system might very well contribute more scientific progress over their lifetime than the latest career academic.
The reward for that investment is the same as the reward for the next guy who gets it down to 22.45ms, despite the first guy saving 0.1ms on the state of the art and the second guy only saving 0.05ms. Surely 0.05ms is worth a lot less than 0.1ms to society, and it shows this whole thing is almost totally detached from any value to society.
It's just lowest number wins and the industry will consume any number of resources (running CPUs in spinlock loops instead of more efficient ones, having human labor climb microwave towers at some risk of life) up to the reward amount to claim it, regardless of any marginal value to society of the improvement.
That said, I find it hard to believe you don't have constraints on what you can pay labor? Maybe it is field dependent, but the NIH sets some real low ball salary caps on how much postdocs (and other titles) can be paid with their grant money. So if you rely on this sort of government funding it is difficult to pay postdocs a fair wage for their experience and stage of life -- forget about it if you live in a particularly high CoL area, which NIH does not adequately account for.
So yeah, postdocs are taken advantage of in a lot of fields in a way that is (to some extent) beyond the control of the advisor. In a cheaper area it's not necessarily dire straights, but it is often a huge underpayment nonetheless. And if you talk to postdocs a lot of them are doing it because they're still chasing tenure track dreams that are not super likely.
At what point is it wrong to facilitate minor league baseball? I don't think there's an objective answer here, and obviously I don't blame people for trying to do their best as a PI. But I also don't think the OC's reaction to the situation is outside the realm of reasonable for an informed person.
As an aside, you're (unsurprisingly) kinda fucked if you wanted software to be part of your NIH-funded project, because they do not acknowledge the cost of hiring anyone with a remotely valuable skill set.
I am at now a point as a researcher where I am financially secure, work on interesting problems, and have time for my wife and children. My colleagues, junior as well as senior, seem to be in similar situations.
To be clear, in my case "focus and neglect" meant working weekends and evenings and lots of travel for some years before we had children. I see successful people in other careers doing the same.
My current situation does not involve anything remotely like "pushing shit" or "abusing junior labor". I have no "hard constraints" and I see no "financial abuse" at my university.