When you are spending billions of dollars on programs, 1m is peanuts.
If you can speed up a billion dollar program by 1%/improve by 1%, you got your money’s worth.
But people of that tier usually make a much bigger impact.
Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C# and typescript is a great example.
He created two major modern languages, take typescript alone, there are tens of thousands of developers who work on just the tooling for typescript between eslint, webpack, react, angular, etc.