TL;DR: consumption of healthcare on a gold plated health plan meant that my total comp was more than I've ever gotten in salary on the FAANG RSU train and whereas its easy to talk about RSUs its hard to talk about 'golden EOBs'.

The eye opening has roughly two versions all of which you can see in a peer group when babies start landing:

1. The tail event

Lets say you're a SWE making $500k/yr then you have a child and run up a $2m NICU bill and then a $2m cochlear implant bill after that... most people look at your $500k in 'salary' (base + bonus + stock) and say 'wow you're well paid' in reality what they should look at is your $5 copay and $1k total annual and say 'wow you're well paid' (an extra $1,999k in consumption enabled by your work). Remember it's even more extreme than raw numbers b/c your $1m in wages over these two consumption events gets squeezed through an income tax that (in CA) is ~50% vs. your employer sponsored plan paying the $4m in bills (granted crazy hospital Monopoly dollars) without that tax drag.

2. The ordinary frustration

boplicity and I consumed the same service (OB ER triage) and boplicity ended up unhappy to be out 'multi thousand dollars' in user fees whereas I was happy to be out $5. When a peer groups starts having children this first - for many - substantial engagement with the healthcare system shows just how different 'good' employer sponsored plans are. In my peer group share of cost, network of options, extent of benefits were all meaningfully different even among prestige employer plans. The fear of infinity $ as an upper limit paired with the loss of agency involved in infirmity causes a lot of consternation about the money and choice. It's hard to price the absence of that worry and feeling you got the short straw in the relative buying power game devalues your prestige employment.

For my part, I felt fortunate to be on a plan that exposed me to ~zero financial risk or sense of network loss during a healthcare consumption event. This was not always so. As a healthy single 25 y/o with that first package I ignored 'fringe.' It didn't even make the xls doc from the HR people a free gym you use with your boss's boss is hard to price anyway. Now having worked through the GFC / COVID & consumed some healthcare the RSUs are harder to budget and health insurance reads like a deranged lottery ticket that could asymptotically approach 100% of total comp.

Finally, whether any of this 'ought' to be is a separate question. As a practical matter, today, it is so - my employer can buy things I cannot and can do so with dollars I cannot match 1:1. Sometimes I value them and sometimes I do not. If the person sitting next to me values these more than I do then I am are being under compensated. If HR tried to close that gab with salary we'd have pay equity problem. As such, I believe the present tax / insurance system means we can have any two of diversity of employee preference, pay equity, comp equity (in theory ... in practice it seems we can have zero of three).

Anyway, hopefully that clarifies my thinking a bit. As I said, wouldn't put much weight on it.