There's been a concerted effort to reset salary for tech workers in the past year or so, ever since Elon Musk kicked things off with the mass layoffs at Twitter. The default of Silicon Valley Bank didn't help, and neither did the VC money pulling back for all but AI.
One of the hidden chilling effect is Section 174. I don't know why it is such a big blind spot among tech workers. (Section 174 ruling means US companies can no longer expense software development, and must amortize it. That creates a significantly higher tax burden. It is driving companies to shed all but their best engineers, and drive AI adoption. I don't even know how startups are going to start up without enough capital to cover the higher taxes).