This, to me, is a common fairy tale technical people like to tell themselves to justify not getting involved in the social connections (aka politics) necessary to be fully successful. It doesn't matter what metrics you choose, because they will all be gamed. Just like the politics is gamed. And no matter what game is picked, certain people will just not like playing it, and will bemoan the choice and why couldn't they have picked X, some other random metric that will also be gamed. But at least they like that game so they'll play along and possibly even excel.