The normal person knows that just having big paycheck does not make an executive more competent. We have all seen people with huge paychecks fail spectacularly.

Are you saying there's no correlation between salary and performance?

There's no direct correlation, yes. If you took two executives (or really two people in any profession), one making 10x as much as the other, and swapped their positions, you would not see one position dropping to 10% performance and the other rising to 1000% performance. In all likelihood, they would both drop to 50-70% for a while and then stabilize to their original values.

Individual persons are not orders of magnitude more productive on their own, they're just in environments that allow them to be more productive, for example by giving them control over more resources.

It matters because "normal" people are the ones paying those extravagant salaries in the end.

Those normal people should know that $350k is a steal.

Indeed.

Only if you insist on hiring in the US – while at the same time talking all the time about how you want to fix the fact that you're underrepresented in many parts of the world, by asking some really expensive US staff to fix it ...