you are right. made worse because there's an internal rule that you can't ever have two versions of a library in the monorepo ant the same time. it has to be one giant CL for the entire migration company-wide.
KR stands for "Key Result". They're definitely not "things you do to achieve your goal".
That's kind of the point of OKRs (in theory): To stop upper managers from dictating process to lower managers. (Which is a big problem.) Instead, ignore their process and evaluate them on how well whatever process they chose delivered. IE, give someone an objective, let them find their own solution, and evaluate them on only how well it worked.
OKRs in practice look suspiciously like waterfall software development. When you find yourself assigning ICs programming tasks by economic quarter, you've f-ed up.
"Management [...] wants something that works and delivers economic value for customers and will help them continue to innovate and deliver EVA for them in the future."
You're confusing "owner" with "manager". Most managers just want to get promoted, which usually means increasing their HC/budget, making sure credit for a project's success is their's, failures are blamed on others, getting trendy internal projects, doing endless re-orgs (knowing they'll move on before any true costs/benefits are realized), etc. "Economic value for customers" is an afterthought at best.
(Speaking as a former very-large-company manager.)
that's very common in distributed databases. even traditional databases, it's very common to not have FKs on large tables, and just handle it in software. indexing billions or more of rows is non-trivial.
That can be done in a non-sleazy way. For a long while there were effective caps on what you could earn as an IC, no matter how good. Everyone talks about 10x devs, but a decade ago the only real way to capitalize on it was to hold multiple remote gigs, each where you're accurately emulating the performance of say a $150-200k dev. 2-3 of those is very do-able, and a darn nice income if you're outside the major tech hubs.
As long as you're performing akin to your salary for each position, and you read your employment contracts carefully, I see nothing wrong w/ this approach.