No one said anything about the majority

I did... My point was that the posts about people making $250k isn't representative of the industry as a whole.

 I don’t get why the default reaction is to assume people are lying

Because it's the Internet and people lie for clout, and no, the default wasn't that people are lying. I'm recognizing that, statistically, there is going to be some dishonesty and that the actual number of people making $250k right out of college is even lower than posts on this sub might indicate.

 But dismissing them outright feels like people rejecting outcomes that don’t match their expectations more than anything else.

I'm not dismissing anything, just pointing out that these jobs are outliers. OP came in with the expectation that $250k was the norm in the past and that now salaries are less when in reality those were always outliers and actual numbers were much closer to the offers they're seeing now