That's because CRUD people can do work that is far more leveraged than a hardware engineer, from the business' perspective. So the CRUD people produce more economic value.

One dev can spend 2 weeks automating some process or building a prototype web app that goes on to generate tens of millions for the company with no overhead.

Your hypothetical EE can spend 2 years designing a chip. The chip will then require 100s of millions of dollars to be spent on testing, manufacturing, and sales in order to be economically useful to the company (note that none of those functions involve the EE who designed the chip).

Sad? I dunno, maybe. True, yep. Nonsensical? Definitely not, there's clear logic to why certain kinds of work pay what they do.