Agreed, even though I took a tittle cut, it was still a pay raise… but really depends on how much your current employer lined your pockets as well as your tittle.
have you ever head of the term “transferable experience”? I might have made it up, but I use it a lot when talking to people in similar situations. Ask yourself can you get paid the same amount (or more) with the same title (or higher) at another company… if so you have transferable experience. Sometimes you have to prove it, going from Nike to frog wasn’t easy. I had to prove that I could transfer that experience at a director level from a footwear brand to an innovation consultancy. But I was able to show how the experience mapped.
Short version, think of this as a design project. Create a target, where do you want to work? At what level? For how much? … then asses what you have and what you have done and do a gap analysis.