With jobs, there is no trade off between pay and atmosphere/nice environment. Bad employers pay bad and treat you badly. Good employers give you decent wage and also treat you well
I agree with you in general, but in my industry, there are still lots of companies that buck this trend. Employers that pay competitively but have shitty toxic environments, and scrappy startups where the pay sucks but the vibe is great.
Still, the advice to not think of it as a trade-off intrinsic to companies is solid. You deserve good vibes and good pay from the same job.
With jobs, maybe. With careers, especially in STEM, you get lots of exceptions like extremely rewarding but low paying positions in academia, and tech companies that think they can just spend money instead of effort to fix their culture and broken hiring process.
I can relate to that last bit. There's a reason for the phrase "golden handcuffs".
I think I get the sentiment that OP is trying to make though, a lower pay isn't likely to correlate with a better culture, it's probably likely it is the inverse.