I don't think you understood my point. Lemme put it this way, if govt in France made it a law that you must pay 10% tip to the waiters at the restaurant, do you really think that the waiters would really be 10% richer?
If this were the law, would you not simply consider the cost of dining at a Restaurant to have gone up by 10%? And if that were the case then your eating out behavior would change the same way if restaurants DID raise their prices by 10%.
Since waiters are getting 10% more from the customers, this means restaurant owners will reduce the wages of the waiters by 10% and reduce the prices of the food by 10% (so at the end the waiters end up getting the same amount of salary, it costs the same amount to you to eat at a restaurant and the profit margin of the restaurant owner remains the same).
The fact is, that a company does not (and cannot, even if they wanted to) differentiate between "vacation" part and "salary" part of the employee compensation package. At the end of the day, the vacation costs them money and paying employee salary also costs them money. So when a company decides what compensation package to offer to a candidate.
For instance, if an employee would bring a marginal productivity of $100K in a year, then either they can offer 10% time off (26.1 days off, assuming 261 working days) + 90% in cash, or they can offer 0% in time off and 100% of the salary it would be the same to them.
Technically as the number of vacation time goes up, the cost to the company goes up too (if you took 6 months off, then this means the company might have to get new employees to fill for the remaining six years, which could be expensive).
In your example, you're just valued that much more by your company than your friends are by their companies.