Sadly at many companies that's really not true. The CEO has direct visibility into direct reports and those metrics, but those don't necessarily clearly indicate what changes to the system would do. Largely because they're descriptive, not predictive, in my limited experience. They also tend to be lagging or current indicators, so they tell you what policy was doing last quarter. If those metrics are trending badly, you can't just demand "move X number up" and expect any success.

Any workable management approach relies on not managing down further than your direct reports, and believing what they say. Otherwise you've eliminated that layer of middle management, and have to do their work.

It might happen that this is the correct approach, and how to slice things up is often an eternal argument both on an organizational level and technical level.

Unfortunately that gives a lot of power to the middlemen, whoch they might use against you, but that's how the cookie crumbles.