Yeah. OP’s overly complicated explanation doesn’t convey the reason why this happens, which is really kinda just human psychology. People are probably thinking it’s like observability in quantum mechanics or some shit.
Goodhart’s Law Example:
App has poor testing and low quality. New bugs are introduced weekly. Customers complain.
Management sets a test coverage KPI of 90% for the apps codebase.
Dev team focuses on tests that hit as many lines of code as possible; NOT on requirements, business logic, or anything that would improve quality, or prevent bugs.
Quality does not improve because KPI was an arbitrary statistic that holds no value in isolation. Productivity drops because dev team wasted hundreds of hours writing useless tests to achieve KPI. Codebase worse, abd less maintainable. Company wasted millions of dollars. Customers still not happy. Devs hate their lives.