I know many startups who are now paying _interns_ more than other companies are paying senior devs. It is conceivable to get paid $70+/h at Series A startups as an intern and $140-150k + 20-40k in options as a new grad.

Speaking frankly as someone who has worked at bog standard F500 companies that pay "not so much" to HFT, experience is not nearly as important as raw skill. A 20+ year experience engineer who has mediocre skills will never be able to write a compiler, work on complex distributed systems, or bring new verticals to market (think AR, VR, ML applications) very quickly. A skilled new grad might be able to contribute meaningfully if their hand is held on architecture and design.

For example, it's a reasonable expectation for those skilled new grads to be able to grok and start doing easy tasks in a complex codebase (e.g. on PyTorch or Spark itself or business logic in a distributed system) within a week or less, and for them to require at most 1-2 hours of help from an existing engineer to get started. I posit that a 20+ year mediocre engineer is never going to get the skills to contribute to something like PyTorch if they haven't developed those skills in the 20 years they've worked.