Maybe a particular group of software engineer cultivated the need for careful measures. But the programming field never escaped the idea of simple metrics.

That's because you would always have loosely involved but aggressive and demanding bosses (there is unfortunately an economic value to the boss whose primary task is forcing more effort out of the employee and who doesn't help coordination or anything else). So at best you had two intersecting clouds of approaches with actual accomplishment intersecting with LoC and related measurements.

The thing AI is that it provides all the tools to satisfy that loosely involved but demanding boss. So suddenly you are going to have a larger demographic of people who like LoC and feature-additions as metrics 'cause now they are easy.