Is that 75% number normalized for the area's cost-of-living? Seattle isn't nearly as expensive as the Bay Area (which is where those other companies you mentioned are located), so of course the nominal salaries will be substantially lower.
I went from ~$150 total comp to ~$260 after a couple of rounds of negotiations with the companies who gave me offers. This was a couple of years ago, and I was happy to see another friend who left Amazon for Google get offered over $300k recently at the same SDE II level.
Why are these so high? Do you and your friend have some valuable speciality?
This ain't SF.
Perhaps Google should COL-adjust SF employees up to about $500k/year.
There's a weird life trap where you're making what most people would consider "a lot," but over half your take home pay is eaten by rent and food that costs 3x what it would somewhere else. So your "a lot" turns into "can't afford a car" or "can't save up enough to get out of the cycle" without moving to less desirable places.
Better to serve in hell (SF/NYC) than reign in flyover country?
It's actually pretty fantastic.
1) I've found most FE devs are not classically trained software engineers (most don't have CS degrees)
2) There's still a stigma that all FE is is writing HTML, CSS and JS (when, in fact, there's now entire build management layers, and the frontend stack is as complicated and nuanced as that of any OS' SDK). This is a holdover idea that is starting to diminish.
3) Because of 1, the market likely has more FE developers available to it. I'd be curious to see what your typical self-taught Java, C#, Python, Ruby or DBA makes.
4) I've also noticed a trend of BE engineers showing interest in front-end work, given its new challenges and such, further saturating the market. This is completely anecdotal though.
That gets you to $247K.
At these very successful companies they almost always pay out your full annual bonus and the stocks are outright grants, not stock options.
This is not captured by salary surveys, which only ever talk about base salaries.