Pretend you were a dev, and your effectiveness was mostly described within your 500-engineer department in terms of "how many pull-requests" you merged each month. In the abstract, that seems like a reasonable metric to use - it does seem to correlate with actual output, and encourages smaller slicing (which is generally positive). But two years down the line, you find this one guy, consistently in the top 10 rankings, and you feel like he's just not accomplishing that much, so you start looking into his actual workstream. And you find that he does do normal work, but he produces 10 times as many 1-5 line PRs as the average, each of them adjusting some bit of copy or changing an error message. For the better! And his QA isn't bothered, because his work is very easy to verify.
But he's not actually one of the most effective devs in the company, and it's really irritating that his process-games (a) seem to work (the VP of engineering definitely knows him as a 'high output engineer') and (b) impose some unnecessary load on other bits of the company's process (like the QAs and burning CI credits).
That's the emotion in play here. "Stop wasting our time, we can see what you're doing."