There are a lot of things in this world that are not rooted in rational/pragmatic concerns. For example, in the automotive industry, a lot of the margin comes from upper-end variants of any given model, which are perhaps 10% more capable as the base model but cost disproportionally more and are a lot more desirable. Why do people go for that? Emotional reasons. Are the $2,000 vintage Nikes worth that much, especially if you end up actually wearing them? Depends on if you're deciding on a rational or emotional basis.

A lot of this translates to the work environment. Someone making $300k might feel exceptionally rewarded for their work, until they find out that their peer makes $320k. Suddenly that $300k no longer looks that desirable anymore. Call it an innate quest for justice, call it culture shock, call it whatever you want - if you cannot see why your individual arrangement might produce a net negative result for the rest of the company, then you're ignoring the reality.

You just have to implement certain rules and treat everyone the same. You're either a full-time company, or you're a part-time company. You're either an on-site company, or you're a remote company. If you allow hybrid, you have to allow it for everyone. And if one person gets to work 20 hours a week, then it needs to be a 0-friction process for everyone else to transition to the same arrangement if they so desire. From a staffing point of view, that last part is an absolute managerial nightmare ("sorry, the project will be pushed back by 12 months because all of our engineers decided to move to part-time, and we cannot hire new engineers, because the existing staff may also move back to full-time at any given point").

There is, however, a solution for you - just work for extremely well-funded early-stage startups, because their CEOs will be more than glad to rock the boat internally in exchange for your skills and experience that they would be otherwise struggling to find in a full-time hire. By the time that startup scales and their CEO starts thinking about culture and retention, you'll be off to the next boat that you can rock as hard you'd like.