The fundamental issues with postdoc salaries and grantmaking lies with the US Government. It is the grantmakers like the CDC, NIH, CMS, DARPA, etc that essentially set postdoc salaries for grants.
And these agencies are completely averse to change.
Furthermore, us in industry are NOT going to fund fundamental or experimental research due to relatively low margins.
The PI is typically a tenured or tenure track professor, who got the job based on their research ability, but now they are relegated to an office, teaching 1-2 classes/semester, writing grants, reviewing papers for free for for-profit journals, reviewing grants for NIH/NSF, etc.
Grad students are not well motivated, not skilled, need lots of training, take classes, need to work on a thesis, and often times also teach. So they are low output and high time investment.
Postdocs require little-to-no time investment as they already have most prerequisite skills, have no other obligations beyond research, and sometimes even bring their own funding. They are basically professional researchers and are by far and away the most productive members of any given research group.
Companies aren't going to invest in experimental research in the biotech space as the costs are so high.
Most compounds end up getting validated in some way shape or form by researchers, then productionized by the private sector.
This has a pipeline effect on development in the industry.
For example, mRNA Vaccine research was purely experimental research done by postdocs and junior researchers at UPenn in the 1990s, before being commercialized by BioNtech and Moderna in the mid-2000s.