Founders getting any more than just what they need to live incentivises people to raise money for personal gain rather than raising money to build a company.
It also really blurs the line between founders and employees. How can a founder justify taking a salary at the same or even higher level than an employee while also having a huge share? We didn’t get people moaning about how employees are taking risks until SV founders stopped holding up thier end of the bargain with regard to risk taking.
There's a good argument to say it includes enough money for things like: comfortable bay area rent, ability to replace essential equipment (like lost/stolen/damaged dev-grade laptops) immediately, enough discretionary income to order in Ubereats dinner instead of stopping work to cook whenever in the zone.
The "bare minimum" for a founder to succeed probably rightfully means "enough money showing up every month that they can realistically not ever have to worry about any short/medium term bills/expenses/timesaving-expenditure". You shouldn't be saving for a house deposit or leasing a Lambo on a founders salary, but you also need to not be wondering where tomorrows dinner is coming from or how you're going to cover next month's rent.
"Ramen profitable" should be a choice to eat ramen because it's quick and you can get back to hacking in 4 minutes, not because you've spent the afternoon working out your food budget for the next 3 weeks comes out to $1.27 per meal if you're going to have enough money to not become homeless at the end of the month.
You need to be "financially comfortable" for the 1/3/12 month foreseeable future to be able to fully focus on your startup.
I'm a lot less convinced that being 10+ year financially comfortable is necessarily a desirable trait for a founder. Knowledge that their future financial freedom is 100% dependant on the success of their startup is possibly a stronger driver of "better long term decisions" than someone in a position to think "it doesn't matter too much - even if this fails I have a contingency plan"...
(And I say that as someone who was once part of a team that rejected an acquisition offer that would've meant a half million payout to me, because we believed at the time we were going to be worth at least 10 times that within a year. And we were wrong. But I still stand by that decision at the time and would make it again in the same circumstances...)