I agree with the sentiment, but not the conclusion. Sure, numbers can be abused, just like anything else, but they provided specificity which you can then interrogate and call bullshit on. I won't necessarily fault someone for leaving off the numbers and just speaking qualitatively to the large scale system rewrite they did, but it's harder to evaluate whether such an effort was indeed warranted or was just a lateral move post-hoc rationalized by an engineer who didn't understand the original system and needed to rewrite it just to achieve that understanding. Again, if someone is satisfying the business with such efforts, more power to them. As a hiring manager, I don't want to get into a subjective evaluation of the relative engineering value of specific work at an external company that I have no first-hand context on, but I do want to know that candidates understand the highest level goals they are hired to contribute to. Metrics, however flawed, give a good entry point into such conversations.