What you're describing sounds nice but apparently the incentives don't support it (perhaps because it's better to keep the people who know all about their company than contract execs who know nothing about the company or perhaps even the industry).
I agree with part of what you are saying, hence my tirade about how Chapter 11 bankruptcy laws need reform. But what bothers me is that most people just assume the executives (who mostly aren't even responsible for their pay) are evil, without understanding how everyone acted rationally and morally under the incentives of the broken system. The fact that it's happening on such a broad scale should be a clue that the system is broken, rather than a statistically significant collection of individuals.
Just to spell it out for everyone, there are a few actions happening here, highly incentivized by the system. I doubt many of the self righteous commenters here would do anything differently put in a position to make any of these decisions.
1. You are a major shareholder of a company. The company cannot pay its debts. The debts are greater than the company's assets. You have two options. Vote to file chapter 7 (liquidate to the debtors and get nothing) or file chapter 11 (get the court to forgive as much debt as possible and maybe you will get something back if the company turns itself around). Many of the major shareholders hold significant portions of their net worth in one company, or are institutions (e.g. Vanguard) which have a responsibility to do the financially prudent thing for mom and pop investors like you and me.
2. Predictably, the shareholders voted to file chapter 11. This has already happened. Given that it has happened, you want to give the company the best chance of making a recovery and returning value to shareholders. It makes sense to partially restore executive salaries with retention bonuses, so that you have leadership to keep the company afloat while restructuring. Note that most of these salaries would have been heavily impacted by the bankruptcy filing, in which options and RSU's (the majority of most exec salaries) are now nearly worthless. So you sign a retention bonus as soon as you know bankruptcy is inevitable.
Don't hate the players, hate the game. As I tried to elucidate in this thread, the problem is not any immoral actors, but the power of corporate chapter 11 bankruptcy and the fact that creditors' do not get to vote on the likelihood of it being a better ROI for them. It's simpler to blame it on the evil greedy executives (which makes no sense in this case) or try to make all sorts of band-aid amendments to how you can give bonuses to executives during a bankruptcy, but that misses the core problem.