Specialization, metrics that don't capture true growth/success, and too large of teams also ends up to skilled workers that care less because they have less power or responsibility/ownership.
Small teams with skilled people, the startup model, works best even in large companies. Closer to the customer and more cohesive unit makes for a better project, that is why innovation happens at smaller companies or small research groups in companies or universities.
n(n-1)/2 is the formula to calculate the number of communication channels on a project where n=the number of team members/stakeholders on a project.
On a team of 1, it is all you, you make sure it works.
On a team of 2-3, it is just that few, you make sure you and others are doing their part.
On a team of 10, 45 communication connections, you might not have the same level of care because that isn't my role or someone else has got it. Beyond 7-8 team members communication becomes humanely impossible.
On a team of 100, you have so little power/responsibility that you feel out of place calling attention to issues, you don't know of everyone on the team even.
Metrics are a good thing, to use as an input, so is customer feedback, product goals/focus, usability, employee satisfaction and many other things that aren't always measured like technical debt, product quality, security, simplicity of processes/production, research and development and more.
If you measure the wrong things, it can give you the wrong idea that you are moving in the right direction while possibly overlooking aspects not captured in metrics.
If you only looked at revenue and employee head count for instance, growth might be deceiving. Profit and revenue per employee better, but also employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, the market, product quality, timing, security, long term direction etc etc get overlooked in the metrics department mainly because domain knowledge has less power than oversight in most mature organizations.