Wow. I see almost nothing controversial in the McKinsey article. In a nutshell it addresses hard metrics (DORA) gathered via the repo tooling (commits, MRs, etc) which is enhanced with some outcome metrics, and they combine with soft metrics (SPACE) which are inevitably fluffy on the numbers combined with some other measurements to fill out arguable gaps. But overall, it didn't read like a manifesto.

As far as the criticism from the "ex-finance developers" - yeah, some of whom have done a lot of other noteworthy things outside of "fintech". I don't think it was overly harsh. In fact, maybe just focusing in on certain things that inevitably leave a bad taste - such as assigning numbers to human being's activities or otherwise trying to distill human activity down to hard numbers can lead to abuse - no kidding - almost a tautological argument.

That said, happy people with a shared vision and supportive management delivering a product/idea that is contributing to the team's concept of "the greater good" will always be the sweet spot for productivity.

I would lean more towards the SPACE metrics as the best way to measure, but allow that hard metrics such as DORA can be helpful as alarm bells.