It's a variant of Goodhart's law. Can't speak for the person you're replying to, but absent good management, I've seen review goals turn into nonsense. "You had a goal to fix 5 bugs this quarter, and only fixed 4", "but one was a massive bug that would have cost us $x!", "but you didn't fix 5 bugs, so no bonus"
You see it happen on different levels a surprising number of times.
Anecdotally, when I worked in customer support, we were explicitly told that we had to hit a certain number of replies to customers in our ticket system. So I played by the rules: I very clearly grabbed all the easy-to-reply tickets, sent the easy reply, and dropped them if they got hard.
Appropriately, a manager spoke to me telling me this was unacceptable (though he did concede the goal was stupid), and gratifyingly the official goals soon changed to reflect an appropriate balance of consistency with a customer as well as some degree of overall throughput.
The drawback there is that accurately reflecting what they want in hard metrics might not really be possible because it does come down to a judgment call where the exact balance between support quality and throughput lies (and it's often a shifting balance as well, depending how much support load there is). Which is probably why managers fall back on stupid but easy-to-measure metrics.
You see it happen on different levels a surprising number of times.