I remember Damon Sicore's stint at the WMF. He'd been VPE for six years at Mozilla and then came to the WMF. He ended up working all of eleven months for Wikimedia. When he left he was given $100,000 in severance pay, for a total compensation of $292,258 for less than a year's work.
https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/golden_handshakes_at_...
He was subsequently blamed for the Knowledge Engine fiasco that led to Lila Tretikov's demise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(search_engin...
Lila herself came in and was paid 1.75 times as much as Sue Gardner had been getting. That did not turn out so well either.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
More money does not neccesarily equal better people, just better options. We would still have to chose the right one.
As far as Damon goes, he writes in his blog about his time at wikimedia... its "interesting"
https://damon.sicore.com/wikipedia-search/
I see he links to one of my old Signpost pieces ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
[Note, i used to work there many years ago. My opinions might not apply to the current leadership]