You aren't paid to write lines of code, you are paid to build, ship and maintain products and services, usually in a complex corporate setting with ambiguous and ever-changing requirements. Code is a very small part of the overall picture.
Why do you think in most technical organizations the higest ranking and highest paid engineers generally write the least amount of code (often none)?
On one such engineer there's hundreds or thousands of others executing the idea into work so your premise about "Code is a very small part of the overall picture" is obviously very wrong. You wouldn't need to hire that many people if that was remotely true.