I would suggest a different take-away, it takes power and stability to negotiate power. Basically, you need to have a powerful position to gamble on securing better compensation. If minimum wage were a problem unique to QA[1] then that explanation might ring true but I think the fact that you see the same pattern of exploitation in fast-food and the service sector at large paints a clearer picture that our educational system is just failing to teach people they have personal value.
I do agree that the difference between a good CEO and a terrible CEO can be pretty stark - but I also think that the best CEO can't turn around a company rife with nepotism and other organizational diseases - the plebs contribute a lot more to company health than they're given credit for... That's my primary source of disagreement on CEO compensation - everyone else is being undervalued and so the creation of value is being misattributed to a CEO. The CEO should probably be the highest earner at nearly every company - but only rarely should the CEO earn five or six times that of someone in the mail room and we shouldn't see the 200:1 ratios that are relative common today[2].
1. It does have a unique exacerbating factor, every year a bunch of new grads think "Oh man, video games - I want to work on those" and thus there's a large pool of people willing to be paid peanuts to work in the field. This causes the experienced QA folks to have their labour devalued to compete with the large pool of free labour. I very much agree with your last few sentences - that's what seems to be the take-away for the gaming industry for me as well.
2. A random study - I know the numbers are in this ballpark but I'm not familiar with the specifics https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/