Salary depression

I’m a lead/staff SRE/Devops practitioner that is currently on the market. Is it just me, or are companies in the US trying to drive salaries down really hard? I’ve seen on-call lead engineers advertised as “max 120k” and I talked to someone today who hadn’t advertised a salary but their max was 140k for a lead SRE with 10+ years experience in a senior role.

Are people actually taking these salaries?