There are companies that will pay near FANG levels (maybe 10-15% haircut) without subjecting yourself to onerous completion of hundreds of LeetCode problems. There are other options, and we should be aware of them. You'll still need to prove you can code, but the questions we ask have practical application to our codebases: we use recursion and trees, for example, so we ask questions about those.

Other companies will treat you as more of a human, and less as a cog. In my current job, I asked to see production code when interviewing. I flipped over every stone I could, to know what I was getting into. I saw the good and the bad. FANGs? You must prove yourself to gatekeepers before even knowing if there are teams with personalities you will agree with. You have no guarantee there's something on the other side of the gatekeepers, that you're even remotely interested in.

Money is important, but for a small haircut you can have better WLB, less competitive peers (though still be growing in your career: you can challenge yourself, without being surrounded by hyper-competitive personality types), amazing culture, and a greater level of transparency.