That is definitely not "routine" pay for high school kids writing HTML in any year. Sounds like you hit a clueless marketeer who had been huffing the dot-com bubble.

Hacker News has a disproportionate population of people who work in fields and locations where you can easily expect to make six figures straight out of college, and as a result HN has some seriously skewed ideas about how much money is "real" money. When I got my first programming job (in the mid-'00s, in a town with a population of ~250,000) I made $15 an hour. I was absolutely delighted to get it, and it was enough to live well and save some money besides.

Of course, $22.60 in modern Seattle is less impressive, depending on whether he lives in the city proper or in the suburbs. But you can't expect tax-funded jobs to have the same kind of ridiculous salaries that Amazon and Google can afford to pay. And the guy's an activist. This has got to be a dream job for him--a chance to make a difference in something he's passionate about. Some things are worth more than money.