You’re right. But half this conversation is a bunch of people using random US stereotypes and downvoting anyone who says otherwise. Cost of living is fairly irrelevant when you’ve got an extra $200k/year post-tax to play with. And any company paying that much will give you really nice benefits including fully coverage health insurance and possibly a on-call concierge to help if you have any issues. Being poor in the US is really miserable but I also know people who can’t see a doctor in Europe due to waiting lists (or their GP blocking it) and lack of money for private insurance. Neither case matters if you’re an engineer. And France has the same rate of homelessness as California so neither has a happy community on average.

In my experience managing a large project comes down to having a consistent process/standards and enough experienced engineers in that language. Remove that and every single language leads to abominations.

In my sad experience, you don’t but simply try to avoid getting caught in the blast radius of it failing. Someone approved/supported the project and someone approved/supported the sunk cost that already went into it. Those people have more power than you and they will not like looking bad due to you.