[andy99]

I don’t mean to imply it’s to get employees to accept lower pay. I mean that there is some implicit screening against people who are solely optimizing for high pay.

Lots of reasons why you would want to simultaneously pay well and not attract people who are optimizing for pay.

[syntaxing]

I don’t fully understand why you wouldn’t want to attract people who optimize pay. You always should aim for getting paid what you’re worth which is understandably hard to define. I think that’s the whole point of OPs argument how this is exploitive. You’re trying to sell a “vision” for lower pay.