The other bit here is that hacker news attracted a lot more engineers (vs more entrepreneurial-leaning folk) in the intervening time - and engineers never really made bank on startups. Even in successful startups the engineers are typically lower on the pay-out ranking than the less-technical founders and the VCs...
I'm not sure I agree with that - good engineers should be experts at managing risk. True risk aversion is an impediment in most fields that engineers are called to solve problems in.
That said, we're also pretty analytical, and when one could warm a seat in FAANG for ~$400k/year, even many successful startups weren't outperforming that TC.
