I work at a FAANG (not Amazon), and have heard this a lot, both internally and publicly. Except, never officially from anyone that mattered (leadership). It always starts with a rumor and/or someone (internal) creating a dashboard/metric, and blows up from there. I've even heard leaders proclaim that it's NOT what they're looking at, and that you better NOT be wasting those expensive tokens.
Now, they might be; they've certainly used silly metrics in the past (LoC, commit count, etc.) without ever fully acknowledging it. But I don't believe that it's as simple as more tokens = more better.
Now, they might be; they've certainly used silly metrics in the past (LoC, commit count, etc.) without ever fully acknowledging it. But I don't believe that it's as simple as more tokens = more better.