Making career decisions "not about the money" is an incredibly luxury for someone who needs to live or raise a family in the regions where tech startups are a notable factor.
Perhaps that's the answer to the previous commenter's question about "who takes these offers", then.
Having a tech career at all is an incredible luxury compared to pretty much any other way of making a living. It is easy to have a comfortable life without bothering to chase the high end of the market. One cannot ignore compensation, but neither need it be the focus of one's career decisions.
It's not easy to have a comfortable life in a tech hub! Your home, commute, school district, etc. will be incredibly bad compared to a replacement level college-educated career if you aren't already wealthy and don't make comp a primary focus.
Do you consider Seattle to be a "tech hub"? I suppose it depends on the level of your expectations, but it's hard for me to imagine how anyone could call my family's situation "incredibly bad". Despite my never having been wealthy nor made comp a primary focus, we have a nice modern house in the center of the city, near friends and everything we need, where I can walk to work every day. It's true that the school district is not so good, but that's what private school is for.
What is a "replacement level college-educated career"? That's not a phrase I have heard before.
