It sounds very nice and morally fulfilling to denigrate any numerical calculus of welfare; but in the end you still have to deal with monetary budgets that represent limited societal supply of labor and resources.

You may try to take a moral high ground and say that people are more important than $X million, but those money also represent potential housing, cancer treatment research, green energy investment, etc that won’t be financed. You cannot get away from measuring value of time and toil of people, at least implicitly. Why not then make it explicit and be mindful of it?