This is a strawman. No competent CEO thinks they need to be on top of your unit testing practices. The levels of legibility that companies actually aim for are much more defensible.
Many companies run in such a way that there is no bucket for "engineers get to do stuff they know is important x% of the time." So what happens is that things that executives don't understand the significance of all get 0 time allocation. Other teams may be told they aren't allowed to work on something owned by the CI team (again often for legibility reasons).
This is how I work at a "startup" that has just a single test environment that everyone has to share after 10 years of existence.
The CEO definitely felt he needed to be involved with these practices, to forbid them.
It is not. I once had the misfortune of glancing at the metrics that went into an "executive dashboard" for the CEO/CTO at a startup, and started paying close attention to what they talked about during the weekly all-hands. Other more recent, and widely experienced examples of micro-management by CEOs are forced RTOs and diktats forcing employees to "leverage AI" in some form or fashion, with little care about how this impacts individual teams.
> No competent CEO thinks they need to be on top of your unit testing practices.
You seem to be acknowledging that such CEOs exist, but you built an escape hatch by labeling them as not competent. Your second sentence appears to follow the first, but it doesn't, and is a an unfalsifiable tautology.