I figure it to be controversial because I see the HN crowd as leaning more towards maths/reductionism/measuring than intuition/holism/feedback and while I'm specifically levying the anti-quantification argument against managers in this case it also applies to that approach in general.

A large percent of HN are software developers, and no developer wants to be held to some metric by some non-developer boss.

Yeah, but OTOH we're mostly software people who have seen first-hand what happens when you try to apply naive metrics to software. In other fields you're more likely to be right.