What a b/s!
A good programmer wants to work with a good entrepreneur. And a good entrepreneur knows how to find money. That's the definition of a decent entrepreneur.
Your "working with good people", "good work-life balance" is b/s! You just don't appreciate the work engineer(s) do. That's it. You wanna pay them with snacks, not money. And it's a shame!
My dad and stepmother are now-retired developers. I still identify as one, although mostly I manage now, as it has become more important to me to create a context where good work can be done than to do the work directly. I still try to write at least a little code every day, as I love it. So yeah, I appreciate what engineers do. However.
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine there are only two companies: a good one and a shitty one. At the good one, everybody goes home on time. The code is pretty clean. The people are friendly and supportive. They build good things as part of making happy customers. At the shitty one, though, it's the opposite. It was founded by exploitative dicks. They want everybody to work all the time. They're always rushing, so there's high tech debt and everything's buggy. That means lots of screwed-up schedules and early-morning phone calls to fix production issues. And plenty of shouting and blaming, of course.
Now ask yourself: which company will pay more? Answer: the shitty one. Because if the salary is the same, rational actors will take the pleasant job with the nice people. The shitty company has to pay more.
Years ago I worked for financial traders. I made very good money. I also worked long enough hours that I sometimes slept on the office couch. Too often, I got screamed at by traders, because they liked yelling at people. The work was meaningless; we were just trying to carve off a slight of economic value that other people created. Eventually the work burned me out. It took me a long time to recover.
In the ensuing years I've worked at a variety of places, big and small, for-profit and non-, competent and incompetent. I have learned that there are many more important things to me than money. It's important to me that the salary be fair, both in a mark-to-market and in a results-of-productivity-fairly-allocated way. But beyond that, I care about other things. And so I try to create contexts where I and others can get those things.
If you would rather maximize your income, that is totally fine by me. People want different things. But just because you don't care about work-life balance doesn't mean that the people who do are idiots.
However, terrible places that stay in business are often compelled to pay more. Sometimes they can do that because they exploit their customers. Sometimes it's because they can dump negative externalities on others. Sometimes it's because they cut corners. Sometimes the work is just soulless and extractive.
And sometimes it's just because they are very stingy with non-cash benefits. E.g., I was just talking to someone who had taken 5 months of paternity leave. I have friends who will take 4-6 weeks of vacation per year. I know other people who get a lot of support for education, for speaking at conferences, for learning.
If a company does more of the bad stuff and little or none of the good stuff, they can afford to offer higher salaries. And that's fine. If somebody wants to work at a place like that, godspeed.
As a perhaps more obvious example, consider some equally smart but differently trained people: lawyers. I have friends who joined soulless corporate firms, worked 100-hour weeks for years, and now are doing very well financially. Some started their own small practices doing the kind of law that interested them; they make decent money. Others do public service law for nonprofits, helping people who can't afford to pay lawyers; they make yet less. All of these are reasonable paths, but they pay very differently. If one of the non-profit lawyers gets an offer from a giant law firm, their current employer will not try to match that. Everybody understands that.