Definitely just a thought exercise. In no universe would a hiring manager ever ask this.

"Why did you sacrifice other things in your life to work at a large tech company, operating at scale, for a high salary?"

Edit: Absolutely laughable that you think this will be detrimental to people's careers. Your other comments on this topic are frankly unhinged. If you are indeed a hiring manager planning on factoring this in to your criteria, please know this will be a massive red flag to productive engineers.