I imagine our current hyper-corporate landscape would have us making that assumption.

Are there any recent documented instances of executives being punished in some level of career-affecting way for bad performance?

Even when they get fired they get golden parachutes.

Example: Sam Altman founded a complete failure of a location-based social network, where the board tried to remove him twice, lied about being chairman of the YCombinator board, and now gets to be CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world where the board tried to remove him as CEO once.

Failing up is very common in our corporate system.