When people talk about comp, they usually talk about the # of $$ they took home last year - anything else is magic money so to speak.
For the same reason a manager isn't going to value a $10MM grant in company that ended up being a penny stock, he isn't going to downgrade a company that resurrected from the pits either. Money in hand last year is the best measure possible/available.
That's not what it looks like on levels.fyi. It's regularly:
"SDE 1, 110k + 75k stock options", and then levels.fyi will declare that 185, not 110 + 0, 112 + 38, 115 + 19, 120 + 19
edit: and then people will come on here and say "look! Brand new Google employees make 200k!"
Looking at how they handle Google, for example they show base|annual stock|signing bonus.
So when you see 130K base + 33K stock, that was a grant of 130K vesting over 4 years. And then with signing and annual bonus of ~20K, that person is in fact making 200K starting (although the median is probably a bit lower for a completely new employee).
On the other hand, people often forget about refreshes when looking at these things. And while a refresh grant won't be as large as the initial grant, they do make the overall comp significantly larger.
For the same reason a manager isn't going to value a $10MM grant in company that ended up being a penny stock, he isn't going to downgrade a company that resurrected from the pits either. Money in hand last year is the best measure possible/available.