Does this also apply to large industrial labs, e.g. MSR, IBM Research, Google research etc.? Or are there software developers who work together with researchers in those places, perhaps resulting in better quality code?
It is problematic when a team of scientists collaborate with a product group (not research software engineers but regular developers). In the limited projects I've been involved in, we ask if any product group engineer wants to collaborate on a paper we are writing. No one is typically interested and we would at least add them to acknowledgements. I found product group developers were interested in collaborating for patent submissions. I definitely don't want to generalize but take this as a data point.
FWIW product engineers usually get bonuses for patents, so there's the obvious incentive of $5k in your pocket.
Also, if you're on a patent, you get the cube (and the cash).
There are plenty of Principal RSDEs and some become Managers of technical leaders of teams, which sometimes even include researchers.
But of course, the track is not as clear and common as for plain Researcher or SDE (in a product team).
PS: As far as I know, the patent bonus are there for all (though I can't comment on values).