I've seen an awful lot of either not understanding what a measurement means, or not caring, among management, including out of "top-tier" folks from e.g. manage

I've seen an awful lot of either not understanding what a measurement means, or not caring, among management, including out of "top-tier" folks from e.g. management consulting firms you've heard of. Talking really obvious "experimental error" types of things. Taking a measurement as indicating something when there there are obvious confounders which, if you don't look into them, are probably making your number meaningless. I don't think engineers are the only rational ones, but I think the rational ones in management have noticed that their numbers being meaningful or correct only rarely matters for getting a "yes" or a promotion, so have responded... rationally, since getting useful figures and proving that they're useful is both 1) usually a lot more work, and 2) often not even practically possible.