Comment by renewiltord

The real reason objective measures don't work is that this is a subjective thing. When you think about the good things about code (readability, maintainability, extensibility) they don't lend themselves to mechanical analysis.

We can proxy a little but the core problem is that the function that spits out your metrics for those actually has a hidden parameter of the audience you are writing for and the purpose it is for.

So when the audience is highly familiar with Linux (the kernel and platform) idioms, you could choose an exotic microkernel with far fewer SLOC and actually have true lower score.

Of course that's pointlessly edge case, but the natural simple easier to understand version of that is just using a different utility library instead of the one currently used in the codebase. This one could be smaller by far and still be worse in truth.