The logic for share awards initially was to align the interests of shareholders and managers. The problem here is: you have founders often with supervoting shares, they usually have a huge role in appointing the Board, and they are basically looting everything that isn't nailed down from minority holders.
The big change was Musk's package. When that happened, all hell broke loose. It is a crazy situation because he already has a huge share in the upside of TSLA, but now he is taxing minority holders too.
If anything, this is going to get worse because the rise of passive investing has left the market with essentially no corporate governance escape valves (and, although it is basically verboten to mention this now, changes in "board hiring policies" are having the same effect...if you know, you know...it is not possible to say this explicitly on the internet).
But this is nothing to do with rewarding success or aligning incentives. This is just majority holders who control management and the Board looting non-controlling shareholders. In the cases where this isn't true, for example AAPL, the CEO pay is just wildly out of proportion to the amount of value generated...it is just insane (you are actually seeing tech-oriented PE funds make money from taking public companies private because they are able to gain control over stock-based comp...how crazy is that). Making comp wholly dependent on the share price (as in the Musk deal) is also completely inappropriate because, as a first-year finance student can explain, the stock price is not composed solely of company-specific risk.
Just generally, I don't think executives realise this is going to come back to bite them. I am an arch-capitalist but this isn't capitalism, it is feudalism. The economic system in the US is rigged totally. The level of inequality and unfairness that exists in US society has never been sustained by any society. Executives are creating the machine that will end them.