I don’t know. LOC to me is indispensable for certain refactoring goals in my opinion.

Taking a component and turning it from 7K lines to 3K lines and maintaining functionality obviously means there’s less complexity introduced, less to go wrong now, and less overhead to modify in the future.

Sure it can go the other way, the component needs to support something it might need, we need to adjust larger patterns, this function needs to be refactored into something more robust.

But lines of code is a pretty decent metric of success for “trimming down and cleaning up” style refactoring, to me at least. It’s not everything of course, but it’s definitely an indicator.