Don't forget, to the CEO and their cronies you are all just peons. If they could pay you nothing at all they would absolutely do so.
The point is, compensation is inequitable. Upper management at most tech companies is paid 20-50x what a worker is paid. Do you think that is reasonable?
The fact is that the employer/employee relation is a business one, in which each party looks for his own interest first and foremost. The interest of the other party is only instrumental.
There are power asymmetries, and we can agree that the average guy gets, on average, shafted, while someone born "on the right side of the table" is always dealt the good cards[0].
But I don't think the nature of the employer/employee relation is the problem. The problem is the vast inequality of opportunity at birth.
[0] Though I shall note that in a sense pretty much everyone on this website is born on the right side of the table, and doesn't seem to feel too guilty about that.
And if your company continues to print money decade after decade while paying upper management 20-50x what a worker makes, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world.
This seems at odds with the normal HN view of Google, which is that they can't do anything right but have such a good thing going with ads that they basically cannot fail. If this is true, then an inanimate object could lead the company to success. I am not convinced it is so extreme, but I am definitely not convinced that paying Sundar billions and billions less would actually change the company.
But even if it was, you're probably right that a massive pay cut to the CEO would have no effect if the CEO stayed. However, if a CEO can reasonably command a 9-figure salary, and that gets slashed, they have an incentive to go somewhere that will pay them a 9-figure salary. So that company now has to hire or promote a new CEO willing to do the work for "less" money (I consider myself a capitalist through and through but even I have trouble calling multi-million dollar comp packages "less" in any reasonable sense). There's a decent chance that CEO is going to be worse. So there could definitely be negative effects as a direct result of decreasing executive compensation.
It's the same argument as with developers except there are just more zeros involved. If you want to make the most money possible as a dev, you're probably applying to companies like Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, etc. The folks who can't make the cut there go to "worse" places for "less" money. Not saying there aren't idiots that make it into Facebook or genius coders that don't want to work at FAANG-level companies, but it's common wisdom in part because it's accurate more often than it's wrong.