I can see you're not from a hot job market for software engineer.

Here (Bay Area) people usually don't apply for jobs, specially jobs at startups, unless they're really into the products/team/tech/... Even old-school walking-dead companies like Cisco/IBM/HPE pay way better than most startups in term of cash compensation. And given the high risk of failure, startup should sell itself hard to attract talents.

I also found those questions are normal, far from being arrogant.

There's a whole spectrum between super rich and broke. In the middle of that spectrum we may still have to work for a living, but we have a job an we have savings and if we need to pass up several offers from toxic and/or doomed companies then thats totally OK. That's not arrogant, that's experienced. We have seen the failure modes of management and business models, and want to do a little due diligence before we make a significant investment of time and energy. It's way better to burn a few hours in interviews and even get rejected occasionally for "arrogance" than to jump ship from a decent job to a quagmire. Not that we're accusing you of being a quagmire, but we gotta kick the tires and pop the hood. We've all heard the trope about how costly one bad hire can be. I'd argue that it's much more true in the other direction. Imagine moving from a 40 hour a week job in a clean codebase with good coworkers and management to a dumpster fire where everyone's working 80 hour weeks and the company is loosing money and goes bankrupt 6 months after you get hired. Not a such a big problem in SF, but say you moved your wife and kids to some medium sized city for this job, bought a house there, and the local job market is mediocre. Now you've go serious problems, all because you didn't spend 10 minutes asking "hard" questions.

Not OP:

Good software engineers have options, if they're not working somewhere that offers FAANG money it's probably because they value things other than money such as a good mission, small team work environment, good management, etc.

As a rule, your company can't pay FAANG salaries, so if you want good engineers you need to sell them on the other aspects of working with/for you. There's simply no reason for them to take a bigger risk than they feel comfortable with on your company given the current market for strong engineers.

You may not like that, that's fair, but other CEOs will answer these questions and they're competing with you for that talent.