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Skill is not fungible. The skills and temperment of "25 year old software engineers" making $400,000 a year (of which there are fewer than you seem to think) are not fungible with political skills; software engineers (and engineers of all types, in fact) are famous for lacking those political skills, and for good reason. Finance isn't as far from politics but still pretty far from it. These people mostly never went into politics -- they went into the same sorts of roles they do now, they just didn't get paid as well for them.
If “these people” are upper-middle class graduates of elite colleges with high verbal IQ, their career choices are absolutely fungible. This might not apply to quants or to the most autistic software engineers, but it absolutely applies to a lot of people who go into finance, tech, law, consulting and so on.
I also think it’s a myth that elite software engineers at top firms have no social skills, but I’ll defer on that point.
At Google, decent ability to code gets you to L3 (i.e. entry level). L4 (after two or three years) is mostly showing competence at getting tasks done and having a passing familiarity with Google tooling. L5 (after another two or three years) and after are all about "impact": the technical component is writing architecture design docs for others to read, and it's increasingly about knowing what the right things are to build, positioning yourself to build them, coordinating with other teams and management, and publicizing your work. Engineering management and even high level IC roles have navigating politics as the number one requirement. One of the not-especially-well-kept secrets of Google SWEs is that on average they're not rockstar coders but merely good enough and capable of navigating byzantine documentation, bureaucracy, and internal politics (which is, to be fair, an uncommon bundle of traits).
Someone like Stallman might be hired on purely for publicity purposes, but someone with his affect and hygiene coming in as a new grad would be lucky to make it to L4.
Stallman, with all his quirks, is demonstrably a better politician than any random Google L5.
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Law, certainly -- the law-to-politics pipeline is pretty well established. Consulting also certainly; consulting requires many of the same skills as politics, except for the largely interchangable people at the bottom. Into "tech", maybe, but not into software engineering specifically. Political skill and temperament are not the same as having a "high verbal IQ".
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