If you don't like it, become a founder yourself. For better or worse, the reality is that maybe 5% of developers out there have the stamina, the ingenuity, and the risk tolerance to build a business. Speaking anonymously, as a person who started a business ~12 years ago that employs 17 people. The stuff you have to deal with non stop as a founder who is developing product, working on HR, working on code, working on infrastructure, working on the career growth of your employees, all the while also engineering a business that can in theory run itself without continuous micro-management, is insane. Not a single one of our employees, even our high producing hustlers, do half what my founder and I do on a weekly basis. You have to be a master of everything, because the moment you aren't the lead expert in the room, someone gets you off the rails. Running a small software based business producing a customer facing product is insane.

Add to it the last four years of "culture" growth leading all west coast tech workers to demand you add 10% overhead to your business to advance diversity, equity, and inclusivity, which in reality is just advocation for the right kind of politics to be brought into company culture, and you get a crazy stressful soup for any founder.

I actually very specifically chose the butcher example, and no there isn't. At the end of the day, a butcher, like a software developer can be trained to be good. Initially a butcher would ruin meat and cut into profits by incorrectly making cuts. Over time the butcher can and will get better. Far fewer mistakes towards the end of the career. Same with software engineers. After a point this comparison breaks down, but at least up to here it's comparable. Self taught or not, many educators have proven that good engineering can be taught and practiced. Over time everyone gets better if they care enough. Not everyone can be Donald Knuth, but no one's looking for Donald. Most start up founders just want competent engineers.

Moving on to your second point about entitlement. Of course the founder is entitled to 50x the payout. You seem to be severely discounting risk. Did you see this founder's list of other failures?[1] They can pay themselves whatever they feel is right. They took the risk, failed multiple times, and finally got lucky. Of course they can reward themselves how they see fit. There are so many founders who never see the reward and end up with worse careers because they only kept founding companies rather than choosing a "stable" career. To me it seems like, in your view, the guy who didn't take the risk founding companies and got to join a "sure" job by joining a rapidly growing startup gets to be rewarded comparably to the guy who started something, working, spending years not sure where it was going to go. Why would anyone take the risk of starting a company? I'd rather join a fast growing startup if my reward is quite comparable to the founder's. Low risk, high reward.

[1] https://joshpigford.com/projects