Context: I'm an engineering director at a medium-large tech company. What both the article and the comments here show is that for most users of OKRs, they don'

Context: I'm an engineering director at a medium-large tech company. What both the article and the comments here show is that for most users of OKRs, they don't actually consider the Objective and the Key results to be different. If you consider a key result without considering the objective, then yes, you'll just move a number and nothing more. If you actually try to deliver an objective, and use your KRs to see if you have made progress towards that objective you'll do much better. That said, I've had to fight many times in my career, even with senior-level product managers, to think about OKRs that way. I ideally ask the engineers that report up to me to care first and mostly about the Objectives their team has taken on, and to care about the KRs second. That leads people to do the right work far more often than having them try to move a specific numerical value above all else.