Your theoretical engineers would figure out pretty quickly that crashing a server slows you down and the only way to keep the boss happy is to avoid the DDOS.
I've also run into these local maxima stupidities dozens or more time in my career where it was obvious someone was gaming a performance metric at the expense of the bigger picture - which required escalation to someone who could see said bigger picture to get fixed. Happens all the time as a customer where some sales rep or sales manager wants to game short-term numbers at the expense of long-term relationships. Smaller companies you can usually get it fixed pretty quickly, larger companies tend to do more doubling down.
It usually starts with generally well-intentioned goal setting but devolves into someone optimizing a number on a spreadsheet without care (or perhaps knowledge) of the damage it can cause.
Hell, for the most extreme example look at Dieselgate. Those things don't start from some evil henchman at the top saying "lets cheat and game the metrics" - it often starts with someone setting impossible to achieve goals unknowingly in service of "setting the bar high for the organization", and by the time the backpressure filters up through the org it's oftentimes too late to fix the damage.
Then that got passed down to the engineers and those engineers got ridden until they turned the dial to 11. Some VP then gets to go to the quarterly review with a "we beat our data ingestion metrics by 15%!".
So any engineer that pushes back basically gets told too bad, do it anyways.