There are plenty of small-to-medium sized companies that will pay well (albeit not FAANG well). I work for one.

HN has a very strange employment bubble: there's an extreme distribution towards FAANG-tier companies, a decently sized tail for startups, and then virtually no representation of the places where 90% of people are actually doing software research and engineering: consultancies, contractors, teams within non-software companies, and so forth. Not all of them are well playing (and some are downright terrible), but plenty are.