Look, you're framing it in a very bad way, and I'll sound like a prick regardless, but I'll try my best.

First of all, let's ignore the "ordinary workers" as a group, because that's way too vague to base anything off of. There are ordinary IT professionals that are just that in their field, ordinary, and there are exceptional people doing manual labor that the society doesn't think much about.

As for the pay, I know it seems disproportionate or "too much", but it really comes down to things like repetition, value generated, skill variety, scarcity, and adaptability. There's plenty of programming jobs that anyone familiar with the white collar jobs would call dead-end, because they got you working with the same old and irrelevant stack basically keeping some old system on life support with occasional changes, and these often pay salaries lower or at least comparable to non-IT jobs, all because with these jobs, there's very little to none that you have to learn, you don't have to adapt, you don't have to come up with creative, yet technically correct solutions all the time, and you're very replaceable, so the company doesn't feel like they should share more of their profits with you - they're simply not that afraid to lose you.

Things like frontend, on the other hand, often pay higher salaries compared to the above, because not only you have to work in a rapidly changing environment over there and adapt to it successfully each time, but also use a greater set of tools, some of which you may be working with for the first time in yuyr life, and you're expected to know how to transfer your skills from other tools and projects to properly use here. I know it feels like everyone is a developer these days, but that's because we've always been a very prominent part of the Internet, especially more FOSS and privacy and anti-big-corps parts of it like Lemmy - there simply isn't a way to supply the market with enough qualified developers to drive the salaries down.

No less important is the fact that it's all on the actually wealthy people's whim, because they feel like they can exploit other jobs much more easily than they can devs, who are cherished and valued to a point to have a lot of leverage and many options on the job market - it's much easier to quit a shitty boss when you're working remotely using your laptop and a few peripherals, making enough money to create a safety net.

As for decrease in pay to have more sensible deadlines... again, we have enough leverage and confidence to either influence the deadlines enough preemptively, or miss the deadline and make a lesson out of it. I still have all my skills and knowledge that are worth the money, despite having more time to complete a project.

Most importantly, I don't really care about the deadline, nor does the majority of other salaried developers, because there's really only so much you can force in a set amount of time - a team of 5 people can't build a fully functioning copy of New York in 7 days even if they completely miss any sleep, food, water, and other bodily functions all while doing cocaine and other stimulants, and the same applies to any job there is.