Lol - old graybeard ... it was Bill freakin' Atkinson. Author of HyperCard and one of my heroes!
This story came up often when I said I read the commits daily. I would just roll my eyes and say "I read code, I don't look at arbitrary LOC".
If the story is true it shows incompetence with the managers to pick such an arbitrary metric to measure with. Plus, when you start policing people like this you can damn-near guarantee motivation goes in the trashcan because now it's a "me vs. you" thing... and eww who wants to come to work with THAT?!
He put -1998 lines on his daily email?
And I think that hits to the core of Goodhart's law:
""When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.""