Until then you don't have anything to "highly" correlate, so you can continue to guide people towards substance instead of questionable metrics

I would love for you to show me a high-quality code base where even 5% of functions exceed 70 lines.

I for sure haven’t seen one. Most of the best, easiest to work on, and stablest projects I’ve worked in my 25-year career have had the overwhelming majority under 30 LOC, and maybe 1% over 70 LOC.

As with all smells, yes, they are simply correlated symptoms of deeper issues and not necessarily proof positive. But they are correlated.

I don't understand what you expect here - you're treating these metrics as a sure undeniable sign of quality, so by definition the examples won't be high quality. So of course you "for sure haven’t seen one", what kind of circular logic is that?

> Pretending they aren’t

But you're the one doing the pretending, making up high correlation with nothing to correlate, and coming to circular conclusions (if you define it as smell, then yes, you aren't taking about roses)