TBH, I don't feel we really got paid until about 2012 or so- or at least it did not reach me (on the east coast around NYC) until then. I spent the first ten years of my career lamenting my choice, for the amount of effort, both mental and number of hours, it took to do the job, while my business-oriented peers in college were doing well but seemed to never have to work on a weekend or miss a happy hour/dinner. Until around that time I was always considered a second class citizen in just about any company I worked at.
Two things happened around 2012- the "startups" became "tech giants" and started competing with each other for talent with real money or RSUs, not just options that may pan out one day in the future. And tbh the work became easier- its hard to really understate how important the ability to just "stack overflow" a problem is, and the modern stacks developed to a point where it was really hard to make a case to roll your own libs instead of just pulling one off the shelf. As an example, I used to do C/C++, and until boost came along and started getting adoption in the mid 2000s, each time I changed jobs, I had to learn about a whole new "stl" that each company had built and all its quirks and fumble around for at least a month or two while I figured out how to do basic things like string manipulation Their Way. Web went from straight DOM manipulation and fighting with IE6, to toolkits and later frameworks that smoothed over all of these issues and let you focus on building apps, not UI.
Even without having worked for a tech giant, I am very grateful for them lifting all tech salaries, and I get to live in a very nice comfortable house that is almost paid off. I am glad I stuck it out- I was actually starting to study to become an actuary because I was so fed up with being treated like a peon around 2011 by people whose job I could easily do, but wouldn't have the slightest idea on how to do mine.