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Are there actual examples of companies going under because of excessively high salaries? AFAIK unions where they damage companies mostly do it by protecting poor performers.
Maybe not a central example, but the union deleted the rock island railroad by striking even though the company was on the verge of bankruptcy
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Salary load can be notable in some industries, but I think it only rarely takes down entire companies (more than capable of causing problems on a per-location basis of course) because it's not often actually the biggest cost on the balance sheet (just the most "controllable" which is why so many emphasize it a lot). It is pretty "sticky" though, so it can compound otherwise controllable problems when a major financial shock happens (this has happened to a few airlines, for example). That's not quite a single point of failure, though it might depend on how you parse the question.
The big thing to note is how the problem used to be worse when pensions were a thing. Many, many companies would go down because they didn't have enough in the bank earning investment return to cover pensions and didn't have enough from revenue to pay it either. Part of why so many companies dropped pensions in favor of the 401K as soon as they could. But even then, you'd still have legacy stuff - GM in 2009 comes to mind, Wikipedia says "For each active worker at GM [in 2006], there were 3.8 retirees or dependents in 2006". Yikes.
The other failure mode is start-ups who hire too much too fast, but that's not really what we're talking about.
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British Leyland was a bit of each. Good wages, and sleeping on the job. Holding on to your job when you do not do it is also a form rent extraction, so it doesn't change the point that capitalism has some internal defences against rent seeking. (The system has defences, the individual companies just fail.)
"protecting poor performers" reminds me of the Brezhnev era joke We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. I claim that the "slacking on the job" form of rent extraction is present under both capitalism and socialism, supporting my main claim that rent seeking is not specifically capitalist.
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Studebaker.
Never had a strike, thought they had a great relationship with the workers, highest paid union workers in the industry.
Then times got tough in the early 60s as the Big Three started to squeeze out competitors, there was a Studebaker labor strike in ‘62 which blindsided the management who, again, had rolled over at every opportunity previously and seemed to be under the impression this merited some sort of loyalty. They continued to have labor conflicts throughout the 60s and the company was dead in ‘68.
There were other issues as well, few things are single-factor problems, but high labor costs were either the #1 problem or a major contributing factor.
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