Henry Ford paid those high wages to his own staff. He did not prevent any other local companies from also paying low wages.
So Ford’s strategy had a significant advantage over minimum wage laws, in that his strategy didn’t destroy any jobs.
When you increase minimum wage, there is a sliver of the market that gets shut down: the set of jobs that made sense between the old minimum and the new minimum. Those are jobs that people were happy to work, but which they aren’t allowed to any longer. Those people are now out of a job.
When Henry Ford decided to pay his own workers well, he did so with his own money, and in a way that didn’t break anyone else’s existing economic arrangements.
In other words, he didn’t violate anyone’s consent in order to enact his version of economic activism. This matter of consent is the key difference between the actions of a private entity, and the actions of a government.