The one time some manager voiced such an idea, I very overtly in front of everybody offered to make “loop unrolling” software working at the source level (compilers already do it at the Assembly level in some cases for performance) for me and my colleagues to really boost that code line count (while totally screwing maintenability).

Mind you, all devs in that meeting were loudly against measuring performance by code lines, but I like to think that suggestion of mine really hammered down the coup the grace on that “brilliant” idea.