I think you want people to want to be on call (or at least be willing to be on call). There’s no way I’d ever take a job where I was on-call and not compensated for being on-call. On-call is work. Even if nothing happens during your shift, you have to be ready to respond. You can’t get drunk or get high. You can’t go for a hike. You can’t take a flight. If you’re going to be so limited in what you’re allowed to do, you deserve to be compensated for your time.

But, since you’re being compensated, it’s also reasonable that you expect to have to respond to something. If your shifts are always completely quiet, either you or the devs aren’t adding enough new features, or you’re not supervising enough services. You should have an error budget, and be using that error budget. Plus, if you don’t respond to pages often enough, you get rusty, so when there is an event you’re not as ready to handle it.