That's not true, think of all the small to medium businesses there are. All of them got "CEOs" or whatever you want to call them and in many cases they do regular work besides leading the company.
I know a quite a few people who are very happy in their respective companies. Heck, I'm employed in the perfect template of a bureaucratic, capitalist megacorp and our CEOs shield us from a lot of bullshit of the group we belong to.
I think "CEOs = bad" is oversimplifying a lot. We just don't hear about the good ones, because ragebait sells and capitalist media is something actually fucked up at this point