Most of the time it's due to having some leverage (multiple FAANG+ offers).
the SWE ladder requires/expects for an L3 to get to L4 by makes no such requirement to ever get to L5.
Also career and personal skill wise, it's good to see how other companies work. Pay is in many ways determined by your negotiation skills, and that is empowered by creating better BATNAs via interview skill.
In NYC a senior dev makes that much or more in finance, and in a startup probably closer to 140-160 with bonus and fuzzy-numbered stock options. I don't count my stock options ("units") as anything worth anything at this point, not because I'm cynical but because there's no clear valuation.
All things considered I'm suddenly feeling underpaid - I know many quite senior folks barely breaking that.
We aren't talking about stock options, we are talking about concrete RSUs with real valuations.
A Staff Engineer at Google can easily be vesting $200k in stocks alone each year.
It's true that they make a lot of money, so do the owner of a SME or a director in a large organization. It's not a position most employees will ever attain in their lifetime.
That's true for non-public companies, but stock options at a publicly traded company like Google or Apple are much easier to value.