I made more than my PhD advisor and my postdoc PI in my very first job out of school. I left academia, because I wanted to work less and make more.

The lab where I did my postdoc had a joke that the first graduate student to make it big at some startup had to come back and endow a chair for their advisor.

I'd say they were when I was starting out in 2002. Obviously not perfect, but they had a lot to offer. That steadily changed until the pandemic. Then the job went to shit. I no longer recommend students look for academic jobs. I'll give my support if that's what a student's after, but I've talked to enough people that have moved away from academia, and academic jobs are dominated on pretty much every dimension in 2025.