On the other hand, look at the history of Apple. It had multiple CEOs, and was nearly bankrupt until Jobs took it over, and built it into the biggest company (by market cap) in the world.
This was clearly due to Jobs' decisions, which were enormously productive in that they produced hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wealth.
Steve Jobs was an outlier. It's not useful to use him as an example if you are talking about CEOs in a general sense.
Some CEOs might be worth x100 the average salary. A small few are exceptional, many are middle of the road, and some probably drag the company backwards (e.g. Ballmer at Microsoft).
A bad CEO can do a huge amount of harm to a company, even if it has excellent workers.
So perhaps the value of a CEO is more in that they put the right people in the right positions and don't hold them back.
So in a sense to get a measure of the "value" of a good CEO you would need to not measure them against a bad CEO but perhaps against a company without a CEO at all where smart people self-organise.
It is clear? It is a compelling story, but people also see dozens of compelling stories out of sports every year where it is much more obvious that a lot of the variation is chance.
This is not to say Jobs was a bad CEO or it was pure luck, but to say Apple's turn around was mostly due to Jobs' decision making seems not that clear to me.
Indeed, a company of talented people working on the wrong things is worthless. So too is a company of talented people working on the right things but in ways that undermine their chances of success. CEOs (sometimes) have the power to make decisions that determine whether the company they lead is able to be successful.
This is far from the full picture. He got a generous stock options deal and a corporate jet.
He absolutely deserved those for his achievements, but the $1 salary was a brilliant piece of "optics" that would fit nicely into headlines. According to the link below, this was equivalent to almost $40m per year in benefits.
Of course, no one remembers the mouthy paragraph above, and the "$1 salary" thing get remembered.
This was clearly due to Jobs' decisions, which were enormously productive in that they produced hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wealth.