I strongly think this is the wrong attitude. After a point, money does not buy happiness, job satisfaction or sanity.

Yeah, but I want to get to that point.

Currently, there are a lot of things in my life (old house, old cars, etc) that more money will simply remove from being a headache in my life.

Nobody is going to say no to 100k to 150k bump from developing to managing.

200k to 250k is a different story.

It is all relative, but in general vast majority of people would be in first example.

"After a point", yes.

But that point—at least in terms of its dollar value—keeps rising, and these days it's out of reach of far too many non-managers.

Well, and that's a major part of the problem: Even if you continue doing better and better work in your current job, you will never get paid more for it. If you want more pay, you have to seek a promotion, and the only jobs that get paid really well are management jobs.

Frankly, this smells a lot like a continuation of the old feudal mindset, where the people who tell other people what to do are considered to be more worthy, more valuable, better people, than the people who just...make things with their hands.

There's really no inherent reason why the person who is coordinating my team should be considered to be more valuable than me. And there's certainly no reason why the organization should consider me qualified for that position just because I do this one really well: management is a different skillset, that one doesn't naturally gain just by doing a non-management job really well. (And I can say this with some certainty, because I have seen both very good and very bad managers, and the difference is night and day. Not just on the morale of the people they're managing, but in the results of what they create.)