I am a machine learning team manager, sounds similar to your role, but in a large traditional enterprise company. What I see more of is that big companies expect to be able to dictate wages to candidates completely independently of market compensation or competition for candidates.

One thing is that people up the food chain are usually rewarded for outwardly displaying one-sided emotional buy-in to the company's stated mission, to the point that their jobs largely consist of emotional labor, cheerleading every initiative, restructuring, TED talk, executive announcement, etc., as unequivocally "good", never "bad", and 100% forward-thinking genius.

Surely most of them have internal, private lives where they know this is nonsense, but they cannot let it be seen or even suspected. And as a result, their language must always be based in the presumption that any candidate in the world would be lucky to work for us, and would have to be a fool to choose to work somewhere else, and that if they turned us down for any reason at all, it must always mean their heart was in the wrong place and they were insincere and misguided to have any doubt about working for us.

When you are trying to create job requisitions, slides about growing a team, etc., and this is the sort of attitude you're going to face in the approval meetings, it is wickedly difficult. There's no way you can come right out and say we don't offer competitive salaries, because that would mean somehow "we are bad." And HR, whose job isn't tied to the actual productivity of my team, is more than happy to sycophantically agree with upper management, and try to spin the story that either it just takes time to find the right (read: unwittingly cheap) candidate, or else it's the technical team's fault for not doing a good job with interviews.

Then there will be some lengthy song and dance about hiring third party recruiters (who will tell them the same thing -- candidates who are good enough are not cheap enough), sexy new start-ups in the HR space, like HackerRank nonsense, or management consultants, followed by tenuous re-orgs, restructurings, constantly reworded job ads, tweaking of job titles, creating more and more "road maps" about what roles we see the team growing into, etc.

And after months, or even years, of wasted effort on all that junk overhead, we'll still just be lacking the basic productivity we need to create the basic business outcomes we need. Different managers will have quit or gotten promoted. Different start-ups will have gone out of business or popped into existence. Different consulting companies will offer new over-the-moon promises about finding talent. And it all just repeats.

When it comes to wages in these companies, the amounts it would take to hire a top-end candidate (say, maybe, $350K in total compensation or something) is absolutely trivial to the company's budget. They could pay thousands of people at that wage, even including overhead for benefits, etc.

It really has nothing to do with the wage. It's just about this perception that the company is entitled to get the labor it wants at whatever price it wants. Followed by great ideas being slowly bled to death by never-ending re-orgs, consultant engagements, and ever changing management personnel.