Oxide is able to do this because they are founded by folks who have (well-deservedly) an incredible brand and following. For example, I've had a few interactions with Bryan Cantrill over the years, and he's come off as super smart, down to earth, empathetic and fun. It's a good combination.

They're a cool tech company doing cool tech stuff, so folks want to work there and are willing to make salary tradeoffs to make it happen.

Pay has never been an accurate reflection of skill and skill has never been an accurate reflection of what a person can bring to a company. Big Tech thought they could use a combination of paying more and a stringent interviewing process to get the best talent. It turns out in the era of gamified interviewing (LeetCode and friends) that they were wrong and now are laying off tens of thousands of people. Having done over a hundred interviews at one of those big tech companies I was shocked by the people we were hiring and how much we were paying them towards the end of my time there.

Interviewing is a game of generalizations without any one-size-fits-all solutions. If you're a startup doing something ambitious, such as a from the ground up hyperscaler rack and software system, you want to attract extremely experienced and qualified people. Experienced and qualified people with a track record are likely on decent enough financial footing that they can get by on a salary with potential for future upside and an interesting problem to solve and mission.

Also later in your career you can't put a dollar amount on looking around at your co-workers and being thankful for working with high caliber people.

This is significantly more than a lot of people who will read this thread makes. Might want to check your obviously insane amount of privilege.

I hope to make this much annually sometime before I die, but I am not totally confident I will get there.

Having fun and making a cool product is more worth then more money and having to optimize a shitty ad-algo...for example at meta/google.