Technical leadership is almost nonexistent, and frankly, not required, in most of the CRUD shops that are out to "disrupt" the industry du jour. If all you are doing is slapping together a website with a backend that serves up the dreck while operating a two-sided market that's grinding actual humans down and fleecing naive consumers on the other, or perhaps the next DeFi con where rich marks are being convinced to hand over their money, "technical leadership" simply amounts to being on top of the latest faddish javascript framework / crypto snake oil vaporware / insanely expensive and asinine cloud-native gobbledygook.
As you have said, actual technical leadership can pay at a large tech company but those are relatively few and far between.