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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.