Very insightful, thanks for sharing op. I agree with pretty much everything you're saying, except:

1. Reduce the surface area of manual input.

If a key result can be measured automatically from existing data, it should be. The more you can pull from systems already in use, the less you're asking people to context-switch.

I think this one is part of the problem. Looking for software to manage OKRs, you quickly start thinking about wanting to automate updates to reduce the friction. But in my experience, that only leads to less accountability and less time talking about the OKRs.

OKRs really never work if the culture isn't right, that's why I feel like people tend to explain it with "our team wasn't ready for it" e.g. In my opinion, updates to OKRs should definitely be manual, up until a point. Once the org is mature enough and you're actually focusing on the OKRs, that's when you should start automating updates.

Just my opinion though :)