> If I commission a part specified as 10.00 ± 0.01 mm, I can verify it with a calibrated micrometer

But there is someone that needs to design that part, specify the material needed and a few other things. The actual verification is fast because someone has compiled the list of checks. And compiling that list of checks is hard work. In other words, where '10.00 ± 0.01 mm' comes from is very important.

That's why people says typing code is not the issue. Code is merely the medium of '10.00 ± 0.01 mm' definition. The actual product is the software process. And that is already a black box as only a few developers goes on to learn computer architecture and instruction sets. Instead we deal with high level instructions like map, filter, and print. Which are the tools to say '10.00 ± 0.01 mm' instead of "this length" while demonstrating with fingers. And yes for programmers, most specs are as imprecise as the latter form.

the real world doesn't consist of people sitting at home measuring square metal blocks. Judgement of just about anything sufficiently complex requires discernment, a critical eye, intuition and even taste.

A codebase and its long term health is never judged by someone going down lines of code with a ruler, but with experience that only comes from intimacy with software development. If you don't have that kind of living immediate judgement (in German we have the word Fingerspitzengefühl, lit. tip-of-the-finger-felling) you end up with people measuring your progress in commit frequency or token consumption because they in some autistic sense have nothing else left but to measure and quantify random things. We end up with so many idiotic products because the kind of people who had intuition and would immediately throw the thing out were fired, and now you have people who mistake random noise and metrics for the real thing.