Perhaps the question is why the Bay Area is the golden standard here? Half the salary would make you top 10% earners in almost all other places in the world, bu

Perhaps the question is why the Bay Area is the golden standard here? Half the salary would make you top 10% earners in almost all other places in the world, but because the salary is paid at SF levels all the "poorer" users have to step up and match the SF expectation? I couldn't find where Henry lives, but this setup allows him to go live anywhere he wants. I'm also unconvinced by the "most popular tool" argument. Sure a huge amount of people make use of babel, but it's only a (very) small part of the complete tech stack an average company would need. I.e. database, frameworks, other programming languages, nodejs, deployment and management tools, the underlying OS; there are dozens of dependencies that are critical nowadays, all which need to share the available donation pool.