Xenophon wrote about the march of the 10,000 Greek mercenaries whose officers were murdered by the Persians, inside Persia. They elected new officers, swearing to obey their orders, and fought their way out of Persia, returning the survivors to Greece.
And who's to stay the internally-promoted folks will demand any less payment?
Anyways, sounds like you're just opposed to these payments fundamentally despite all of the rational arguments that have been elucidated in this thread in support of them.
Either you think they’re not, or you think that now you have evidence they are based on the fact that the current execs drove the thing to the brink. That’s a fair piece of data for a lot of cases, but I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of pandemic-shutdown-induced cases that we’re seeing now.
Bad judgment. I've seen plenty of capable people in management positions who get supplanted by outside hires installed above them. Sure, sometimes it does work out, but many many times it does not. The outside hire ends up pissing people off to the point where most of the high-performing talent (including the people who were passed over for promotion) leave, and the department goes down in flames. I've seen this happen firsthand quite a few times, and hear about it happening all the time.