I reread what I wrote, and I don't see where I advocated paying yourself nothing.
If you have $5+m in the bank, you're probably post-A, which means you have the funding to pay the founding team salaries, perhaps below market.
If you have 5m in the bank and you're paying yourself 200k a year, I sincerely question the logic of the board, and the CEO. That extra $80-100k can go to hire another person.
That CEO might not be able to take the job without that extra $100k. People buy houses; get loans; get families; split up and end up paying alimony; incur all kinds of other costs. It doesn't take a lot for someone who comes from previous high paying jobs to have commitments that makes $200k/year tight.
I agree with your overall point that it's a red flag if the CEO demands lots more than they need (and they should be prepared for questions about why they're asking for a certain salary), but drawing a specific line does not work.
100K generally pays for about 5 months of a highly talented programmers salary+ overhead. It may depending on funding levels extend a startups runway by less than 1 week.
Compare successful Authors and find making 200k/year is far from the top. Why? Because sometimes highly productive people doing the same task are less than 10% as efficient as others. Dentists, Athletes, Programmers, Lawyers, Sales People, Architect, and most other complex jobs have a huge range of talent once you cross highly productive.
EX: JK Rowling made well over 50 million per year working on HP. 1% of that is 500k which is still extremely high for an author.
If you have $5+m in the bank, you're probably post-A, which means you have the funding to pay the founding team salaries, perhaps below market.
If you have 5m in the bank and you're paying yourself 200k a year, I sincerely question the logic of the board, and the CEO. That extra $80-100k can go to hire another person.
What is going to benefit the company more?