I'm not sure about other companies, but in Amazon a $1M engineer tells you how to build a VM called firecracker, another $1M engineer single-handedly implemented a distributed log service and made it the backbone of multiple AWS services. Another $1M engineer convinced the company to build EC2 and SQS. In Snowflake, a $1M engineer spearheaded the Apache BEAM initiative and wrote the best book on stream processing when he was in Google. In FB, a $1M engineer lead the RxJava and Hystrix projects for years until functional reactive programing turned from a niche into something mainstream. The list can go on.