I've repeatedly seen both high quality and low quality tooling act as massive force multipliers even for small teams; the question is just which direction you want to multiply. They say an army marches on its stomach—well, a tech effort marches on its tools. I interned at a trading company with, at the time, maybe 100 developers that built almost everything in-house and yet was quite a bit more successful and productive than much larger teams I've worked on since. The larger teams had incentives and structure to "focus" on what's "important" for very narrow notions of important... and so they ended up with lower-quality internal systems, a bunch of day-to-day drag on development and, both technically and organizationally, far less adaptability. (Turns out, one of the major advantages of investing in your own tools is that it builds up deep institutional knowledge about tooling that is hard-to-impossible to maintain otherwise.)

Only valuing easily-measurable work is, frankly, a modern organizational disease. It's like searching for the keys under the streetlight—and why? As a substitute for human judgement or resolving disagreements? As a way to make work more legible for executives? It leads to unforced errors and systemic problems, but we can't seem to do anything about it.