Try moving into a large company _without_ OKRs. How much redundancy do you need to buy to achieve your service reliability goals? Well, you can decide on any goal you want but management now has the right to declare the decision wrong post-hoc:
Got an outage? Should have spent more Didn't have an outage? Why are we wasting all this money?
And of course, by avoiding any public commitment like an OKR, they are somehow absolved of accountability in the matter.
I've been at my current company from it's series A, through a series B, a layoff, sale of one of it's IPs/customer bases, and ultimately sale to a holding company.
I agree with your overall point -- working with a small group of people who all know each other is great. I've had the opportunity to work with some people for the better part of a decade, and having that kind history with coworkers can be a real boon for communication and planning. It's also much more impactful when a coworker decides to leave.
The real shift towards a more sane work style happened after the acquisition by the holding company. It came with a layoff at the start, which was really disruptive. However, since then, there's been a huge focus on profitability rather than growth. Willingness to make big investments is much more conservative.
Ditto.
At this point I feel that spending my entire day writing emails (even though I'm on engineering) would not only look better but would meet OKRs, while getting zero actual useful work done.
I hate this fad.
I felt like I wasn’t able to motivate myself to do the work, because I was incentivized to do what you described. I ended up doing both, poorly, but honestly I was able to make it a shockingly long time (I’m surprised I was the one to realize and decide to leave, no manager conversation yet).