I had a previous employer that started counting commits. Doesn't matter what you do, if you had to spend you whole day interacting directly with a customer(or even at that customer location trying to figure out some issue), nothing mattered. Only the number of commits. Not even the commit size mattered.
So I started doing tiny commits to counter that.
I would gladly use this thing as a f* you before leaving.
Your story brought to mind this bit of Apple folklore[0], wherein Bill Atkinson, the author of QuickDraw, reported his weekly LOC as -2,000 after implementing optimizations.
That's pretty common, my contribution to my current work is surely in the negative as well due to the massive amount of spaghetti code I had to refactor.
So I started doing tiny commits to counter that.
I would gladly use this thing as a f* you before leaving.