> that's more 90k/year which allows for a decent living in most places

Not only a decent living, but that's a very good salary in most places in the world. As an anecdote, I've always worked in private sector IT (as a developer and manager), have around 20 years of experience and worked in both small and big enterprises and startups, and I've never had that high salary. If you'd offer me that for working on open source full-time, I'd be surprised. My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?

> Probably not enough for San Francisco though

Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco but still the group somehow want to have SF salaries. Yeah, I wonder why?