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It's worth noting that the tax rate might be 90, but the effective taxation is a much lower percentage of the earnings.
Corporate Tax is calculated after costs, while personal tax is calculated more or less directly on earnings and then you need to cover your costs from whatever remains. This might explain the confusion.
I suspect the bigger cause is just people constantly being told straight-up lies founded on misunderstandings of how tax brackets work from a young age. I got my work permit to be able to get part time jobs when I was 14, and even when I was legally barred from working anywhere close to 40 hours a week, my father was already warning me "be careful if you take extra work, because if you do too much overtime, you could wind up in a different tax bracket and have to pay so much in taxes, you wind up with less money than if you kept working." Which, now that I think about it, in light of you bringing up corporate taxes and how they work, I believe could just be clever propaganda from business owners misapplied by workers. During that time period, it was a perfectly valid tax strategy for companies to take extra profits and chuck them into capital improvements and similar projects to raise their costs. If they had just kept it as profits, they would have paid substantially more taxes on profits past a certain threshold, and they would make more money in the long term by avoiding those taxes than they would have if they just "made too much in profit" in the one year, to begin with. So, there would be a grain of truth to it in that specific instance, but it's wholly inapplicable to a worker who believes their check will be smaller after working 50 hours a week than if they had just worked 40.
Yeah, companies still do that regardless of the rate.
As for understanding progressive taxation, I think the easiest way to explain it is simply to ask how much money you'd have after taxes. It always pays off to make more money. Perhaps show a XY diagram with income and income after taxes. There's no magic bracket where the graph goes downwards.
They still do it, but in different ways now. The government has removed the incentive to reinvest in capital projects and wages to reduce your tax liability, and now companies game it in different ways that tend to just juice the compensation of the executives. Your CEO in 1955 had minimal incentive to boost their own pay above $200,000 because they could only keep 9% of what they earned past that point. It made more sense for them to just reinvest in their companies because they could ensure long-term stability and profitability, or spend money in the short term that ultimately reduced the amount of work they had to do in the future to complete all the tasks they were hired to manage for their $200,000/year salary. Nowadays, companies can just get tax exemptions up front for "creating jobs" before they even break ground on a new plant, put off maintenance and investments into the company and just chuck all that money they saved into stock options for their executives that will be taxed at a rate comparable or lower than what their lowest paid workers will have to pay on their salaries.
There was little point in burning the candle at both ends as a CEO in 1951 to get a $50,000 quarterly bonus for hitting targets if you only got to keep $4,500 of it. Why go nuts trying to juice your income by a measly 2.25% a year when you're already at the very peak of US incomes? In contrast, a CEO today can go full MBA corporate raider mode, run a company into the ground so it's shuttering its doors within 5 years, and then screw off to wreck another business after collecting a few quarters' worth of multi-million dollar stock option bonuses that they'll only have to pay some modest capital gains tax on. The incentives for good corporate leadership have been completely dismantled and replaced with an entirely perverse set of incentives that are now causing everything to be run into the ground.