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According to data provided publicly by GitHub, Bouman made 2,410 contributions to the over 900,000 lines of code required to create the first-of-its-kind black hole image, or 0.26 per cent. Bouman’s contributions also occurred toward the end of the work on the code.In contrast, contributor Andrew Chael wrote over 850,000 lines of code. While CNN attempted to give Bouman full credit, explaining “That’s where Bouman’s algorithm — along with several others — came in,” they slyly admitted that fellow researchers told CNN “‘(Bouman) was a major part of one of the imaging subteams,'” even after CNN incorrectly wrote on the previous line that she was on one of the “imaging teams,” not subteams.

Source: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/woman-who-media-claims-created-black-hole-image-contributed-0-26-of-code/

This analysis seems to disregard the way collaborative scientific research actually works; are the metrics being discussed sufficient to measure this kind of contribution, or the impact someone has on a project of this nature?

The metric does not measure what it is claimed it does, and even if it did it would be meaningless for assessing the role of Dr. Kate Bouman in creating the image. I'll go on to why, but I first want to draw particularly attention to the fact that Dr. Bouman has explicitly rejected the idea that she deserves sole credit:

But Dr Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit.

The effort to capture the image, using telescopes in locations ranging from Antarctica to Chile, involved a team of more than 200 scientists.

"No one of us could've done it alone," she told CNN. "It came together because of lots of different people from many different backgrounds."

(source)

The primary reason the metric is meaningless is that Dr. Bouman is credited with developing an algorithm not with typing lines of code, so any metric measuring code production is simply not measuring the thing she is credited with doing. She could have typed not a single character and still designed the algorithm that played a key role. It's like trying to measure the input of an architect by how many bricks they laid in a building.

Additionally, the project is broader in scope than simply implementing the algorithm credited to Dr. Bouman. Large amounts of code are involved in simply loading and co-ordinating files, displaying and saving images, and the like. All of which is necessary to the project at large but not specific to the algorithm used.

Finally and least importantly, the statistics in GitHub are not even measuring Lines of Code written - as claimed in the source - they are measuring lines changed in submission. Those lines can be code, or a change to a line, or a line copied between branches, even blank lines. In fact, (and, hat tip @Polygnome) the count includes lines which aren't even in the code at all, as there is also data and documentation included.

Technically, that is the percentage of the code she contributed, 2410 lines in 90 commits.

From https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors

But that tells us nothing about what the code does. Andrew Chael, the man who is credited with doing the work in that article, has spoken up against the rhetoric used against her.

From https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/katie-bouman-black-hole-image-first-telescope-a8866536.html

"While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data.

"With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that
rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper.

"As a result, this is probably the most vetted image in the history of
radio interferometry. I'm thrilled Katie is getting recognition for
her work and that she's inspiring people as an example of women's
leadership in STEM.