I guess the salary formula takes into consideration the whole universe of players when establishing the value of which skill. Many players who had the higher salaries are growing older and having their skills decreased and not many new players replace them at the same level due to the sinking number of teams. So your 150k player used to be part of the, let's say, 98 percentile last season and now they are part of the 99 percentile, so they got relatively better than the other players thus their salaries got higher.
Hmm, this is actually good point view, might be true. Thanks.