I like this perspective, I added something similar in the original post on Reddit. The problem here has to be React and not 80%+ (sample) of the software engineers that use it.

What your comment and all the others here saying that on country X this is a very good salary for a "median" senior engineer is missing, is that the average senior engineer has no clue on how to maintain Babel.

Most people in the software industry (including senior engineers) are doing CRUD work, you got a web dashboard that calls an API that then insert or retrieve content from the database, you got a simple `if` condition or a `for` loop here and there, and that's it. Compare this to creating a compiler, the difficulty is on another level of magnitude.

I built something on those lines, although way simpler in terms of functionalities and resources used.

All I wanted was to receive/send emails from a custom address (@acme.com) using Gmail, but I didn't want to pay Google Suite for that.

So I used SES+S3+Lambda to receive emails and forward then to a Gmail alias (email+acme@gmail.com) so I can attach a filter on them using a label. And for sending emails using the address, I simply authenticated it on Gmail using the "Send mail as" option using AWS SES SMTP credentials.