Rob, you clearly don't work in the same industry as the rest of us if you think that it's "too cynical" that (dysfunctional, understaffed) software engineering teams can count on losing their best employees every 1-2 years.

https://www.invene.com/blog/limiting-developer-turnover states that the median employee time in any position is 16 months, and I haven't even seen that as the median among colleagues I've had working at 5 different startups in the last 3 years.

There's no point in waving your hands and saying "reward effort" when companies routinely pay more for executives (for "strategic thinking" and "people operations") than the entire engineering team...

The good engineers will move on to a higher salary, because there's no point in working in software engineering except earning a high-enough salary that you can save at least 30% of your salary and eventually retire to a life of not-homelessness.

Good luck out there!