I've upvoted you because I agree, broadly, with what you say.
The thing is, for many small to medium companies, they don't have a dev team in house. It doesn't make financial sense.
What sort of guidance do you expect the CTO to provide when his main technical capabilities is ensuring that procurement gets the correct spec laptops for employees, that the correct permissions are set for new employees on the microsoft accounts, that Teams works for everybody, that the support staff go on appropriate training for the software they use, that there is a migration strategy for the next version of Windows ...
That sort of person is not, and is not expected to be, qualified to code-review your PRs.
Even if they know how to use git, they won't have a git repo set up, and even if they somehow managed to do that, they won't have a clue how to use Jira or similar correctly, and even if they do know, they still won't be able to code-review properly.
This is why they'll pay more than what a tech company would - you'll be bringing more value to them, and they'll be trusting you much more than the average FAANG trusts their senior engineers.
