But I'm more optimistic about testing programming models. You can run repeated tests, and compare median performance. You can run long tests, like hundreds of hours, while getting more than a few humans to complete half-day tests is a huge project. And you can do ablation testing, where you remove some feature of the environment or tools and see how much it helps/hurts.
And we can judge developer performance, it just takes 6 months to a year working with a team so it's just hard to get metric