I agree with you. His books on JavaScript are really great. They treat JavaScript as a first class programming language and not a scripting language and teach you from first principles without naming any of the bad actors in the JavaScript world and no biases. His Books are amazingly well written. I too am surprised how less he was paid compared to what I believe would be his calibre.
The other interpretation would be that the absurd salaries that we hear of are the outliers and most very good engineers flatten out at around 200K USD
I once worked on Upwork. Getting the 1st project is really hard. And seeing quotes of USD 500 for entire fully functional applications was depressing. There were people from India remote places like small city Chandigarh or small town in Kerala or people from Bangladesh who would actually bid for these. I finally asked Upwork for a feature where I could blacklist clients who I thought that the price offered was too low. I wanted a feature like - "dont show me any bids from this client" . But unfortunately Upwork didnt create such a feature
The other interpretation would be that the absurd salaries that we hear of are the outliers and most very good engineers flatten out at around 200K USD