You touched on this but to expand on "numbers driven bullshit" a bit, it seems to me the biggest drag on true innovation is not quantifiability per se but instead how organizations react to e.g. having some quantifiable target. It leaves things like refactoring for maintainability or questioning whether a money-making product could be improved out of reach. I've seen it happen multiple times where these two forces conspire to arrive at the "eh, fuck it" place--like the code is a huge mess and difficult to work on, and the product is "fine" in that it's making revenue although customers constantly complain about it. So instead of building the thing customers actually want in a sustainable way we just... do nothing.

We have to do better than that before congratulating ourselves about all the wonderful "innovation".