I think there are 3 'kinds' of QA who are not really interchangeable as their skillsets don't really overlap.

- Manual testers who don't know how to code at all, or at least arent' good enough to task them with writing code

- People who write automated tests (who might or might not also do manual testing)

- People writing test automation tools, managing and desigining Test infra etc. - these people are regular engineers and engineering skillsets. I don't think there's generally a difference in treatment or compensation, but I also don't really consider this 'QA work'

As for QA getting paid less - I don't agree with this notion, but I see why it happens. Imo and ideal QA would be someone, who's just as skilled in most stuff as a dev (except does something a bit different), has the same level of responsibility and capacity for autonomy - in exchange I'd argue they deserve the same recognition and compensation. And not giving them that leads to the best and brightest leaving for other roles.

I think it's amazing when one gets to work with great QA, and can rest easy that anything they make will get tested properly, and you get high quality bug reports, and bugs don't come back from the field.

Also it bears mentioning, that it's self-evident to me, but might not be self-evident to everyone, that devs should be expected to do a baseline level of QA work themselves - they should verify the feature is generally working well and write a couple tests to make sure this is indeed the case (which means they have to be generally aware how to write decent tests).