My experience is that the higher you go, the less rules and objectivity exists. You get paid more because you have to navigate this. An e.g. Developer just has to work on the backlog, there might be technical challenges but the requirement is obvious.

Once you get to Exec level, do we hire more to produce more work? Close a department because it's losing money now (but might not in the future)? Do we stick with our current market that we have most of or go after a new one that is untapped but less familiar.

All of this with the situation/world/people changing all the time. People can call it a shit show but the truth is that it's hard. It's hard to put relative values on things to help make decisions. Ultimately, it usually takes a step of faith and the ability to execute well to increase your chances of making your decision work. You also need to balance the need to stick with something and make it work with accepting it was a bad idea and canning it.

I suspect in the very large corporations, it probably gets very surreal because 10 levels of management make the execs completely disconnected from reality so they can make it look like they are making decisions without really knowing what is going on (and most of those might never happen because they take too long to fall down the soil pipe!).