For me, the move was less about comp and more about being able to balance my enjoyment of designing systems with my comfort with speaking and evangelism. Once I was at a startup, it was more of a "do whatever needs doing" situation than a conscious choice - I had the experience and comfort with things like technical selling and customer success, so it made sense for me to do and manage those things.
The thing to keep in mind is that the SE career trajectory tends to veer off into one of a few different directions - one is to grow into a people management role of SE teams or orgs, which is great if you like dealing with process and people management, but you inevitably end up spending a lot less time doing sales engineering work. Another is to shift into more of a product marketing or product management role - can be a larger role, more impact, but the sales part of it fades away a lot. Another is to become more of an evangelist or thought leader type - sort of a "super SE", some companies describe these as "outbound product managers".
But I think sales engineer as a dedicated role is one that has a limit to its trajectory if you want to advance in scope and seniority, because it sits awkwardly at the intersection of a few different roles, and as a result requires managing your career more than the trajectory of someone in either sales or software engineering (or product management).