Thats the thing - the indicators when used right are used for science. Namely improvement of self or others. It gets harmful when they are solely used to determine if you should get a raise or get fired.
They can certainly be used to indicate problem areas i.e. "This guy is producing 50% less according to RANDOMKPI", does that make sense or do we need to fix something? But if they are used like "X is at 80% of RANDOMKPI, he will be fired if he is not at 90%" then they are harmful, obviously, because they dont take into account the much more important things like "X is at 80% of RANDOMKPI because he is unofficially the teacher of how to deal with anything in our payment systems, so he spends half his time helping out others, which adds way more value to us than if he was just implementing features" or whatever.
Once KPIs start to drive evaluations, you're down a slippery slope.
But you're not using indicators to do some kind of science, you're trying to use them to make decisions about who gets fired and who gets a raise.
If you're a self-interested human being, you're going to do whatever you can to make sure the indicator points to "give me a raise" not "throw my ass on the street." If the indicator is not a perfect measure of job performance, then you're going to let job performance slide to maximize the indicator.