If a scientist is doing more work to secure grants than doing science (my understanding is that this is very common), trying to justify their own existence, then I wouldn't be surprised that results get skewed towards that end.

If every software engineer and developer had to do more work justifying their own existence than actually coding and developing, I suspect overall software quality would be worse than it is today.

Heh, in support it would be kind of like metrics on numbers of tickets.

The first thing you game would be splitting any big work tickets in to smaller and smaller tickets. In some senses you should ensure any 'different' work on the same call is already split up, but typically you do this within reason.

After that you get into the bullshit number generating phase. Tickets for work not done (fraud imposed by unrealistic number requirements), tickets that have zero relevance or meaning (ticket stuffing). Tickets covering conversations or other things that shouldn't be a ticket.

You're not measuring what you actually want, you're measuring what you can measure, so people start producing what you can measure and not what you really want. Aka, Goodhart's Law.

Isn't the entire VC funding of modern software the exact thing you're pointing at? And the grifts that have occured because VC funders grivate towards justification of existence rather than anything else.

Isn't the rise of the AI companies that claim they can improve programming yet present such poorly debugged front ends, websites, etc, exactly the "software quality" problem you dont think exists?

I think introspection is required here.