Sick days are part of an employees' compensation package

Not only is this not accurate whatsoever, as companies are not required to pay you for unused sick time

If the employment contract states "paid sick days" then your take is entirely wrong.

What makes this truly bad though is that employers that do pay out for unused sick time see way fewer incidences of "sick time as general PTO," and workers actually get their full comp, and should be a standard across all employers.

Great, so we're back to incentivizing people to not take the time to get better and creating an even more toxic environment for "pushing through".

The whole idea of paid sick days is to create a burden free environment so that people can take the time to recover without thinking "I really need this extra bit of cash, I'll just suck it up".