Comment by charlespierce

The problem with that mindset is that there is a huge difference between leading a greenfield project with very few users and leading an established project that's a major piece of the infrastructure in basically every front-end app. In the former case, the bulk of the work is actually building the functionality, so looking at PRs / commits can make some sense. In the latter case, there are more constraints to consider and a lot of the work is in determining _what_ needs to be worked on, as opposed to actually writing new code. Also in things like project management, fundraising, etc., which don't show up as GH commits.