1) Inflation. My starting salary out of college many years ago was $35K. Today's starting salaries are double that. Double in less than 20 years. A $50K salary in the early 1980s is equivalent to $120K today, not controlling for geographic location--HCOL areas are actually far worse than that. Let that sink in as you plan for retirement. My take is that you are never going to save enough for retirement because inflation is insidious and never sleeps.
2) The mythology of the higher salary range. How do developers get past that second mode? They start their own company! Only a few rarified corporate people and independent consultants can pull down pay in the 200s. Again, I'm not thinking about SV where the pay is so skewed due to the HCOL. So everyone else works a number of years and ends up in the 120s-150s and they think they are doing great, but they really aren't (me included) due to #1.
Any way you look at doing software development as a career you come to see that it stinks. I'm not going to recommend it to my kids. I think it's important to know how computers work and how code works and not to be afraid of tinkering with those things or coming to believe that you have no control over it, but as a business, it's nasty and getting nastier.