By and large, they do. The fact that this incident makes to the top of the “news” is testament. If things were different, an exec going to jail would be as commonplace as a convicted felon going to jail, and it would hardly be newsworthy.
Volkwagen is one of the world's largest companies. That's why it's headline news.
A billionaire drug company's ex-CEO was arrested last year [1]. Nobody outside the Arizona, pharmaceutical or opioid crisis circles noticed. Nobody outside those circles needs to notice.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/drug-companys-billionaire-ceo-arre...
While many in pharma still get off scot free thanks to solid lawyers, one can only hope for similar results in other industries.
Dig up a massive amount of dirt and sift through it until you find something that has the kind of sentence you're looking for and you can easily make a conviction on (regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with the crime at hand) is prosecuting crimes 101.
Martha Stewart, Bill Clinton, Al Capone, etc, etc.
Now, this is a crappy solution because it basically relies on the proliferation of criminal law and catch-all laws (both of which are bad IMO) and the fact that given any random thirteen people you can convince twelve of them that the thirteenth is a criminal if you have enough information about the 13th. Ideally charges would be related to the crime but that's not a practical strategy for prosecuting well connected defendants at present.
The point I was trying to make is the percentage of convicted felons getting jail time ought to be close to the percentage of companies (i.e. their executives) guilty of egregious violations and abuses getting jail time.