I'm not making a statement of fact about CEO pay since 2020. I'm saying that whether or not it's up by more or less than inflation since then has nothing to do with them being fundamentally overpaid.
Apply this to dev pay as well. Just because you're a few % off since 2020 after inflation does not mean $300k salaries are overpaid or that they're appropriate. They're two unconnected data points.
If you don't have the market power to have garnered a good pay increase over the past 2 years of record profits you're almost certainly underpaid, like teachers, nurses etc. If you got massive pay increases you're almost certainly overpaid, like CEOs.
The connection is right there. Maybe these two things could somehow become disjointed but they really don't appear to be such in any meaningful way in the current economy.
there's two "meaning" to being underpaid; 1) the work being done is captured by another party, and thus underpaid to the worker doing the work. An extreme example is slavery - they are underpaid.
2) the second meaning of underpaid is the perception from other people that the profession is producing value for society, but the payer of that work (usually tax payers) is not compensating for the value dispersed throughout society. Examples might be teachers.
I can understand the first notion: the 'price' offered is not enough to clear the market. In your example, there are fewer people who voluntarily would be doing slave labour for slave wages, than willing employers.
The second is a bit nebulous. I think it's mostly down to social desirability bias: people say stuff that sounds good, but doesn't make much sense.
Apply this to dev pay as well. Just because you're a few % off since 2020 after inflation does not mean $300k salaries are overpaid or that they're appropriate. They're two unconnected data points.