Which leads me to a hypothesis that there's some other quantifiable out there that would work better than unit test coverage: a "diversity test" metric. The software artifacts produced by writing code and after a build are not "the software" in the sense of the whole project. Documentation, support, and so on are also "the software." Logging and profiling tools enable debugging methods other than "stare at the code very intensely". If you start from a holistic standpoint and assume quality requires multiple angles of inspection then your choices of technique broaden substantially.
If you changed a mandate of "must test all code" to a mandate of "must either test, log, profile, or document all code" you would add leeway for the corners that are test-averse to be documented or logged instead, and vice-versa. The combination gives you a palette of feedback: if it's hard to do any of those things, you have bad code. Ideally you can get all of it, but that is unlikely to be the norm for most organizations most of the time. But more bugs will be caught by this web of feedback than if you mandate any one of those methods alone.