You're not wrong, but to many people, the appearance of a non-profit (notwithstanding the legal status of Mozilla Corp) operating in an extremely high CoL regio

You're not wrong, but to many people, the appearance of a non-profit (notwithstanding the legal status of Mozilla Corp) operating in an extremely high CoL region isn't good. If SV doesn't trigger that for you, think about, say, a non-profit headquartered in Monaco, that asks for donations so that its employees can have a nice home and QoL in Monaco with salaries several multiples of your own for comparable work.