I’d love to see someone try to estimate the exact value added by any single software developer working in a team

Thats literally what the job is. You can go get an entire degree on this topic and learn precisely how you assess the value someone brings to a team. It's an entire field of study.

I didnt say its easy, its actually incredibly difficult

But... thats why CEOs are supposed to be paid such a high salary, its supposed to be super hard

However, instead a lot of shitty CEOs just short circuit out to incredibly stupid metrics for value that have been proven time and time again that they are not accurate at all, because they are easy methods and the CEO is lazy.

An actual serious CEO who knows wtf they are doing and genuinely knows how to measure company value, can indeed measure how valuable an employee is, thats their job.

But it requires a lot of work and, turns out, a lot of CEOs are actually not qualified for their positions, and would rather just slap monitoring software on everyone's laptops and metric them by mouse wiggles per hour, lines of code per day, bugs solved per sprint, or any of the other usual "sounds good to stakeholders but is actually totally useless and destructive in practice" metrics.

I'd like to see someone assess the value against cost for some of the management I've left behind.

Many of them would be right-placed shortly after.