An interesting question is whether paying enough (imagining an unlimited budget) won't end up selecting for coders who care more about the money than the work.
A further question is whether these coders are actually better for the org -- the Henry Ford efficiency wage-type incentive may keep them at consistent pace and quality, whereas rockstars with physics PhD may have parallel agendas to make the project more fun to work with.
Consistent quality requires accurate measurement. If you can't accurately measure quality and there's only external motivation, you get Goodhart's law.
But Goodhart's law applies to anything that's measured at all (it originates from the world monetary policy), even if it can be measured vey accurately.
OTOH maybe quality exists as a qualitative concept but can't be measured -- then you just do pass/fail (like colleges have dropped letter-grades during the Zoomdemic).
What I'm saying is that "shallower" coders, who are motivated by the extra pay, may be more willing to align their concept of quality with the interests of the organization, while self-motivated coders will have their idiosyncratic or fashionable ideas.
When shopping around for a team to make a web app for my startup -- no technical requirements, we were feeling the market for price first -- we got a $$$ proposal for using PHP and Laravel, and a $ proposal for using AngularJS. I regret that decision; it cost us at least a year of time-to-market.
The original team quit (they worked for a trusted friend of our "business cofounder") because they weren't really experienced in web dev and their opportunity cost was off the roof - they were crack coders that did all kinds of different projects. Then we decided to hire someone (with good references) as a consultant and manage him ourselves. Dude was apparently capable but couldn't be screamed into using off-the-shelf components rather than rewriting and refactoring constantly. He eventually flaked on us, got too many projects and we weren't fun anymore I guess. Finally we found a small company online. By all appearances the new team hates being around computers but can be managed by Trello and feature branches. Web dev is a bore, but it's a living, and not everyone manages to make a living out of their surfing passion.
A further question is whether these coders are actually better for the org -- the Henry Ford efficiency wage-type incentive may keep them at consistent pace and quality, whereas rockstars with physics PhD may have parallel agendas to make the project more fun to work with.