Has anyone ever taken a significant lower salary for options?

Long ago I did. The options ended up being worth less than the paper they were printed on. The upside was, that since I took a very low salary and could do the job of several groups, I survived many layoffs, mergers, layoffs, mergers of the dot-com era. I did not really sacrifice lifestyle, as my work was also my hobby.

I think that most of the time companies offer options over pay, they will get mostly naive people hoping to win the lottery. The exceptions will be if the prospective candidates research the company, its leadership, board members, investors and the success history of all of those folks and determine it is a smart business choice. In that scenario, they may get they people with a good deal of experience. The people with experience will also know to negotiate a non-dilution clause.

> People often say "The best founders are able to attract the best talent because they offer options. They also are able to attract them at a far lower salary"

People don't say this. Shrewd founders say this so they can take advantage of gullible and naive engineers.

The stuff that "people" are saying is pure bullshit. It's all stuff that is used to manipulate naive twentysomethings into wage slavery at below-market wages. Those options are not going to amount to anything either, statistically speaking. The first rule of working in startups: never accept lower than market base salary. Second rule: move out if you do not see career advancement (architecting and delivering major parts the software stack while learning skills that are heavily in demand outside, or managing others to deliver nontrivial product). Be completely unsentimental about these two points, and you can still make something out of the experience.

People sacrifice or significantly defer personal goals such as dating, marrying, and very often, having children, because they (rightly) perceive these things as cutting into their work time, and therefore, their rise up the career ladder.

I did a bit of that, and I regret it. The fact is, if you do it for a fixed amount of time (five years), and get a payoff and use it wisely, it would be worthwhile. But that depends on so many things going exactly right as to make it almost impossible.

The chance of any startup succeeding is rather low. For the vast majority of companies taking a significantly lower salary for higher options just means you're going to lose 5-6 digits in opportunity cost over the years you work there (if you're can get into a FAANG as a SWE could be 7 digit!)

If you believe in the company and think it has a real opportunity to take off, then sure that might be a good trade off. But for the majority of startups this isn't going to be the case.