Of course. Top execs are critical to the companies success while those who do the work are fungible resources. If the workers were good, they’d be management, etc.
This sounds like a biased article. First of, this increased compensation is only being offered to a few upper level employees. May be they are trying to prevent those execs from jumping ship to competitors like Meta and Apple.
Only FAANG companies have been doing similar things to prevent churn.
Also, normal software engineers at Google are not lowly paid. In fact, all FAANG salaries are in the top quintile in the bay.
In fact, at many of these tech companies, it is easy to hire at junior level because there is a lot of talent applying (unless you are hiring to fire) but harder to retain at the top level
When they want to prevent churn in the rank and file these companies have been known[1] to collude to stop each other from stealing employees. Why don't they do that for executives too? Oh right. Because the executives are the ones doing the colluding.
