Yes, I live in Romania, and salaries have been increasing a bit but they're still a joke for junior devs.
Also, Romanians tend to have excellent language skills in most Latin languages and English so that helps a lot too. They're also really friendly in my experience. I would notice that when I walked around the office people talking among themselves would often switch to English when I was near them so I wouldn't feel left out. And they'd always ask me to join them if I went for lunch alone. And I'm not even a manager :) I was just there to do the technical side.
It's good to remember that, for those people, this is the best job they could get!
Having said that, when I look at a fully spec'd out Mac Pro, it comes out to $54,000. Add in a fully spec'd out Pro Display XDR, which is another $7k, and that's $61k.
According to levels.fyi, L3/E3/ICT2 SWEs at Google/Facebook/Apple get a salary of ~$130k, so just under 6 months of an American junior developer FAANG salary.
I had to split a 2 bedroom apartment far away from the city center with 2 other friends to get to $120/month.
That practice really needs to stop.
Recently I went to a restaurant in Cluj that had an app from which you could do everything: see menu, order, send notes to the chef, pay
The experience needs to be polished a bit (low 4G signal and no wifi made this quite hard to use for me), but I feel that could empower waiters more. Maybe by getting paid the same for a lot less work, or by creating a completely different type of job.