There are plenty of developer gigs in the US with salaries less than $100k, or with contract hourly rates less than $50/hour. Especially if the job is remote or in a low COL area.
Unless we only talk about big tech companies there are more devs under 100k than devs above 200k, for sure, not even close. 300k as a dev you're in the lucky top 10%
People would be surprised how much of the software world relies on low-pay PHP/wordpress developers. I know a few people who started their careers like that.
No-code and low-code solutions have been getting better so the demand for those jobs is drying up though, but there are still massive operations running on top of some wordpress server that people FTP files to.
Every other thread in /r/wordpress is from people who want to get away from Wix or Squarespace because they started squeezing them for $$ for minor features like contact forms etc. When people start paying $20/month for a contact form, suddenly 'Wordpress org' (as they call self-hosted Wordpress) becomes very attractive.
