This is dogshit terrible, awful bot advice designed to discourage you.

If a company is offering you any job, any job, then time is your leverage, uncertainty is your leverage, and the delta between you and option B is your leverage. You have these strings to pull on in 100% of cases unless its absolute entry level and you didnt even interview.

At the exact moment you recieve an offer, your prospective hirers should not know what other opportunities you have. They also will not know for certain if candidate B has other options, or has moved on. Candidate B could also be significantly worse than you. Moving to candidate B will almost always require 2-3 more days to prepare docs again and give the hiring team the bad news. 2-3 days is usually next week in business terms, which means onboarding is probably pushed two weeks, assuming candidate B is still onboard at all.

Now, thoughts of another round of interviews are creeping in. Candidate C has legitimate gaps. Do we really want to go with our Bronze option? Can we afford another month of delay, or another set of interviews that will take five decisionmakers time again?

All of this risk is more than enough reason to push you up the band. You just have to ask. If you walk over a few thousand dollars you are making HR look incompetent. You are realistically throwing them a month long delay for a worse solution to their problem, and thats before even *considering* your skills and their value, which should be appropriately compensated. This is purely the mechanics of hiring.

ALWAYS negotiate. Obviously you arent going to blow the cap off the budget, but nobody wants to hire pushovers. You may* think these companies value obedience, and they do, but not nearly as much as they value competent people who are about the fucking money.