His comment about cost of living was kind of an outright dismissal, very odd? I don't think Google will let me work from Milwaukee.
Where is the information on travel, quality of life (owning a house?), etc?
If you look at Dan Luu's resume and writing, it's reasonable to assume that he's well beyond the 95th percentile himself, so those numbers are very likely attainable for him.
What I mean to say is, my thought is that a developer in the 95th percentile would make their own product/business.
I've never thought of myself as an 'average' developer; but then again most people say that about their driving. It does make me wonder what a bad developer is though.
As for 95th percentile developers making their own products or businesses, that's a completely independent skill with little correlation to software development ability. Beyond writing the software, you've got to market and sell the product, set up distribution channels, support the product, etc. I'd consider myself a respectable developer, but I have no delusions that my development skills translate to any of the other skills required to build a business. I'm generally content to execute in a software development role for someone who has the broader vision and skills to build a business around that product.
And lastly, I wouldn't base an assessment of your skill as a developer on your compensation. In current and previous roles, I've seen a number of salary lists, and there was zero correlation between pay and talent. Some of the most highly-paid developers were near worthless and some of the most solid developers were paid 25-40% less. While it's sad that being a good software developer is not enough to be paid at the top of the scale, we generally have it pretty good in that the decent ones of us are likely to have salaries well above the national average.
Note these are generally not luxurious properties at those prices. Many are small postwar ranchers or Eichlers (beautiful but a pain to update) that have not been renovated in decades. Some houses have negative value because they're teardowns; you'd buy the property for the land.
After taking into account housing costs and California's aggressively progressive tax regime, you may find that $250K salary does not go as far as you like. You may make 2x-3x as much--but your cost for comparable housing may be 10x-15x as high and your tax burden will be more oppressive as well.
Depending on your skills, maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But you might be surprised to learn that the author worked for Google an hour-and-a-half away in Madison? https://github.com/danluu/tex-resume/blob/master/resume.pdf
For example, I currently make about $90k. I interviewed at Microsoft in Redmond and was offered $110k base. Let's call it $130k with bonus. I declined the offer. Why?
I interviewed for a senior position and was told "we don't think you're qualified for a senior position, would you like a junior position"? This is not a problem, except that it communicates to me that expectations will be high for improvement. Additionally, during the interviews, I inquired, "Does the team generally work 40-hours a week?" And they said with a disdainful tone, "Well, we do have one person that works 40-hours a week." That tells me that I'll have to work my butt off for 50+ hours a week. Additionally, moving from the smaller town I live in to Redmond/Bellevue area will incur a noticeable increase in cost of living (specifically rent/mortgage).
So, I go from a pro-rata rate of ~$43/hour to ~$50/hour (a 16% raise, nice but not amazing) but then I have to pay for it with substantially higher cost of living and substantially more stressful workload. As an aside, this was when stack ranking was still a thing, and my questioning of the team during the interview indicated that it was a internally competitive team, which as a personal thing is disqualifying for me.
So if you want a six figure developer position, create a GitHub profile and build some ad-hoc demonstration apps using some interesting modern tools. But just be aware that, if you're not a "top developer" or "rock star", then six figures often comes with a considerable cost.