It would be awesome if we could get statistically significant numbers of people to report on this effect, although how to avoid selection bias etc. is beyond me atm.
Although we had a CTO that grew up with the company (used to be a programmer there) that reported direct to the CEO at the smaller, now we have no CTO and at least 5 layers in between us and the new CEO.
I was developer, and I was middle manager and I understand the sentiment fully. There are many aspects of reality that higher level management has to deal with which are not usually what they want reality to be but in practice you can not change it.
The issue I see here is that there are plenty of companies that are very successful and have a small hierarchy and very little hoops to jump through.
Perhaps I have a pessimistic view of the industry, but I've worked at 4-5 startups now (4-5 because one I'm on the fence about calling a startup) and I've come to find that the most value was always "created" when the devs and middle management (product) worked closely together to deliver and hustled/bustled without being blocked by some upper management bullshit. As soon as these companies grew, and these 250k-300k a year "executives" joined, everything slowly went up in flames. This is anecdotal, but it's an issue I've come to notice through personal experience in our industry.