Just like LOCs and commits, it's a starting point. A general indicator of where you need to dig deeper or who to prioritize in your review.
They say "oh it's not the only measure" ofc. Anything to downplay it to ICs. But then you chat with your jaded manager and you hear echoes of the insanity that goes on in performance review calibration and you aren't so sure about those qualifiers anymore..
1. How many developers have actually been working on this stuff
2. Has the guy who set up the wire-frame actually stepped back
3. Are there more developers doing stuff, then what we get the impression of, based on the weekly Teams meetings
All of these questions could be answered in 1 minute by starting 'gource' + increase the speed of the visualization for the past year. I was afraid that this newly hired consulting company was pretending to use less resources then they actually did, in order to sink their hooks into our company, which I could see instantly that they had been doing. I could also see that the "big gun" setting up the wire frame for the project, had not really been taken of the project at all, but had been helping some of the jr. devs all along. Something that would have taken some digging with 'git log' or 'tig'..