Hi Andres! A friend who happens to be a recruiter called me out over on linkedin with the same question, I'll paste my response here.

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Yeah - that's fair feedback. There are a few articles out there that discuss the cost to a company of going through the hiring process.Engineering hours, etc... For heavy processes it adds up to a lot of money. $10's of thousands.(I'll look it up at some point for reference, I think Gergely Orosz wrote about it last week)If interviews get all the way to the offer stage and fall apart because they lowballed you during offer, after agreeing to a much higher sum during outreach, yeah they wasted your time, but they also wasted like ~$30k of their own money to act all shady.Plus *potentially* the reputational damage when engineers inevitably make the complaint post to all their other engineering friends "they offered me X, I went through 20 hours of interviews and came back with Y"If it's hard to get candidates in the top of the funnel now how bad do you think it would be if they started getting a reputation for bait-and-switch interviewing?