Maybe author knows that too, but wants to talk about it nonetheless. First line of article: “Commits are a terrible metric for output, but they're the most visible signal I have.”
Of course, at the same time we're getting dozens of alerts a week about services deployed open to the Internet without authentication and full of outdated vulnerable libraries (LLMs will happily add two or three years old dependencies to your lockfiles).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive?wprov=sfla1
I would posit that you need extra context to obtain meaning from those metrics, which inherently makes them less visible
If you try to come up with an objective definition of working feature you're back to gamability criticism.