Management by "make metric go up" is almost always terrible in every situation, since human misery is generally not considered an important metric (too hard to

Management by "make metric go up" is almost always terrible in every situation, since human misery is generally not considered an important metric (too hard to measure!) and metrics themselves cannot expose long-term consequences of optimizing for a metric at the expense of anything that isn't being measured. Death by metrics isn't the fault of Jira--Jira provides tools to do many things more effectively, and gathering metrics is just one of those. Providing effective tools to ineffective people, unfortunately, does allow those people to shoot themselves (and in management's case, everyone around them also) in the foot more easily. Exacerbating this, as you mentioned, is that metrics do provide a simple, cheap representation of productivity, even if that representation is not aligned with reality. Middle management can present this to upper management to show that they're doing a "good" job, and upper management will be none the wiser about what's not exposed by the metric until a while down the road when problems created by optimizing for those metrics become more apparent.