> Managers/bureaucrats want to make decisions based on 'metrics', primarily because it gives them cover if it happens to be the wrong decision.

That might be true, but "making decisions based on metrics" is also the core idea of the meritocracy/technocracy. Rather than claiming that a person has special insight or superior intuition, and should thus control the decision, there's this contemporary (post-Enlightenment?) idea that we could instead systematize decision making and thus avoid or at least reduce cognitive bias, corruption and nepotism.