People who truly think this is any useful kind of metric are probably the ones who think # lines of code written = productive work. Or, as Bill Gates put it so nicely, they are measuring the progress on the aircraft by its weight.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
Give people a metric - any metric - and they will (conciously or otherwise) start optimizing that instead of the actual goal.
Besides, if you're a non-technical leader it can be difficult to understand how things are going unless you have some kind of metrics to track.
A good manager can often sense when someone is not doing their job, or has disconnected.
In one case, a good manager came to me and asked me to check the "bossware" software to see if a certain employee was working while "working from home".
...turns out they were not. So we terminated them.
Good manager + bossware = Efficient process.
They didn't "sense" anything, they just asked you to show them some stats on a dashboard. They didn't approach the person for an explanation or conversation.
This manager totally removed the human from the person struggling with their job. That makes them a good robot.
I can additionally imagine that koheripbal was not privy to any information regarding that employee's performance besides that one thing.