We are talking SV here, and that's very different from my European experience. I've known of founders in Scandinavia who walked out from startups that weren't doing so bad and that could have gone for another round of investment because they were earning as much as a bus driver, had zero savings, and were experiencing burn out after almost a decade of work. Maybe that bit of SV culture that lets founders be on par with a highly paid engineer at a big company is up to something. Maybe if it were more of a thing in other parts of the world, we would be more competitive.
Having cofounded both bootstrapped and funded startups, I can say that in each case there was a deadline associated with success: for bootstrapped, we set hard targets in terms of maximum spending and time in order to test our hypothesis. This allowed us to fail fast in our own way and go back to a better paying day job.
For funded startups - at least with a healthy seed round, the investors expected us to burn fast and hard in order to prove our hypothesis or fail trying as quickly as possible, but they also expected us to not pay ourselves very much. As we found product-market fit and raised Series rounds, it was understood that we would pay ourselves competitive salaries.
Being stuck at the seed stage for 10 years is not healthy - neither in Europe, nor in Silicon Valley.
