If a non-founder employee can do that the company is already at Google or FB scale and they're going to be paying accordingly.
And the SDE isn't the only person making the money come in, it's just (usually) very easy to draw a line between new products and revenue, or code changes and lower infra costs. There are a lot of other people - hundreds - contributing to that $60MM but everyone here likes to pretend if the SDE isn't getting 98% of it they're getting screwed by The Suits.
I never understood why people thought there was a giant leap in value between employee #1 and a founder, in terms of value-add. (And if someone can explain it to me, I would be appreciative. I understand how it makes a difference when getting seed money, but not after that.)
Meanwhile, sometimes it is dependent on lots of people. Sometimes it isn't. A programmer is the only person who has the possibility to rewrite some code and make a process take 1% the same amount of time.
Depending on the industry, this can be a 99% reduction in cost, a 1% reduction or a massive, massive increase in revenue (HFT).
