However, from my empirical observation of many executives, there are two broad groups.
The ones you described, those that are worth their salt and have carved out their position through helping the business.
Then there is a large group of executives who exist mainly because similar companies have similar structures and they have expectations of roles for say CFO , COO. Then there are roles required by the industry or market: Head of Compliance, Head of Risk, Head of Auditing.
Those executives have not earned their place, they are appointments by pattern matching corporate structures
The issue in this example is ownership. Executives add value and they are granted large ownership stakes in the business. Workers are not. You use the example of the executive who figures out how to grow the business to prove that he is entitled to appropriate some of the other employees' added value -- since otherwise that value wouldn't exist in the first place. But our developer can't take his yearly salary out of the 15% increased revenue he enabled back in 2012, on top of compensation for whatever value he creates this year.
In any event, the example is very contrived. $10M in sales is as arbitrary as 20% profit margins. Margins could be any amount less or a great deal more. Revenues could be sky high or non-existent. You might expect to find a developer making $100k regardless.
If you think most executives have no idea what is going on and add zero value then I am guessing you haven't spent much time around executives. The whole reason your typical developer got their job and is able to keep it in the first place is because executives figured out how to run the business well enough to grow and continue to hire developers and then allocate them to projects where they can increase revenue. If you think it's easy I recommend you give it a try sometimes.