Eh, this is a thing, large companies often have internal rules and maximums about how much they can pay any given job title. For example, on our team, everyone we hire is given the role "senior full stack developer", not because they're particularly senior, in some cases we're literally hiring out of college, but because it allows us to pay them better with internal company politics.

Because we’re old bastards who remember before React.

They do according to can stats

That really depends on the company. At big tech companies, it's common for the levels and salary bands to be the same for both generalists (or full stack or whatever you want to call them) and specialists.

It also changes depending on market conditions. For example, frontend engineers used to be in higher demand than backend and full-stack.

At the moment it looks like what the market is demanding. A few years ago specialisation was in