Do you mean $500k? On levels.fyi for San Francisco you're talking about the 95% percentile of people who upload their salaries (which tends to the higher range anyway), and that's mostly stocks. So in the highest paying part of North America, at the highest paying companies where employees put their salaries on levels.fyi, a small minority can reach $500k. North America as a whole? Nope.
I worked for an SF company as an IC remotely from Toronto. Total comp was $500k USD yearly. I wasn't the only one, either, and the other guy didn't even have a technical education. He was completely self-taught and just steadily made progress by being humble and curious and hard-working.
Look, I don't really care about money after a certain point. So I'm not trying to encourage people to do stuff for money. What I'm trying to say is that there is a world of software development renumeration that is achievable if you keep developing skill and it is far less challenging than dealing with a C++ codebase.
No, it's not. Some people who read this comment probably do make that, and it's great, but it's not the norm. You have to be exceptional to get there.