Some people at Google are actually quite proud of six digit _negative_ line counts they've contributed. And I think they have every right to be proud of that.
Throughout my career imve found that number of changes comitted correlates pretty well with features delivered and bugs fixed. Also with feature and bug size.
Yes there are edge cases when it takes a day of debugging to make a 1-line fix, but those are rare. Just like it’s very rare to deliver a useful new feature by changing a single line.
Yes there are also features that are tracked as a real ticket and require a 1-line copy change and nothing else. Nobody thinks doing those makes you hella productive, it just needs to be done.
As for padding lines and changes. That’s what code review is for.
One should, but companies often care more about effort than results. They can manage based on effort, they can't manage based on results.
If you spend 2 days getting the same results as somebody else does in 5 days, guess what, they don't want you milling around those extra 3 days and bringing morale down. Gotta give you more work!