What quants actually get paid
Every number you have seen is a first-year total from a top-tier firm. That is a real number and a badly representative one.
Read the parts, not the total
A package is base, sign-on and bonus, and only the first is guaranteed. The sign-on is one-off, so a first-year total systematically overstates year two. The bonus is where the spread lives, and at the firms quoted most often it is also where most of the money lives.
The second correction is survivorship. Compensation numbers circulate from the people who got the offer and stayed, at the firms people want to talk about. The industry median sits well below, and the geography is narrow.
Should compensation decide which track I pick?
Only weakly. The spread within a track is far wider than the gap between tracks, and the thing that moves you up within a track is being good at it.