Sounds like they were doing it wrong. At a high level, senior management shouldn’t care about tiny optimizations like that, and their OKRs should be higher level. Your team should make OKRs that support those higher level OKRs in the best way it can, which is probably not those meaningless optimizations.

Easy to say, but hard to do. I have also had my OKRs dictated to me by upper/middle management. Sometimes I think I was the only one in the room who read Measure What Matters.