If it was just a question of salary/prestige, I think taking a lower-salary job with more research time would be appealing to many people. But many pure-research jobs also have little employment stability, or just don't exist. The ones that do exist are often "soft money" jobs like postdoc and research scientist, which are tied to grants, typically with a contract length of 1-3 years. It's possible to chain such jobs together, but stressful and uncertain, and may require moving frequently (which can be tricky if you have a partner, and especially if you have school-age kids).

There are stable research positions, but they tend to actually be high-prestige and hard to get, like faculty member or permanent fellow at a research institute (Institute for Advanced Study and the like). In some fields you may also be able to find research positions in industry, or at a national laboratory, and those options are pretty popular, where they exist. A really well-funded lab that can string together enough grants to insulate the research scientists from the money flow and provide them de facto permanent jobs can also be such a place, e.g. the heyday of the MIT AI Lab, which had many non-faculty researchers. Also a popular option when it exists, but fairly rare in CS (more common in areas like medicine).