Not sure about the entire industry, but at least for the companies I worked in/with during the last few years, it's the opposite. In most investment rounds/IPO/acquisition scenarios, high HC is a disadvantage. I have seen investors that are actually treating the revenue per HC number as a performance indicator.
Agree. productivity as in "works faster" is not something that justifies being treated (and payed) as 10x engineer. Evaluating "value" of an engineer is also a topic of itself. At the end of the day, this is a team sport. even when a certain project is super successful (and in some cases it might take few month to see business impact) it's not always easy to know how much each individual in the team contributed to this success. BTW - same is true for failure.
Agree with your observation that there is a huge value in having someone that is super technical but still have a deep understanding of the product and business. Exactly for the reason you stated, being able to filter out implementation complexity without reducing the value to customers. In most organizations that I worked on this was done by the first line R&D managers, but I do agree that in some cases people that spent long period of time in managerial role might miss the technical complexity areas. Thx for your comment.