You have diagnosed it precisely, and the fault is in what you are measuring rather than in measuring.
You are tracking the action and hoping for the outcome. The tick records that you did something today. It records nothing about whether it was worth doing. So the cheapest way to satisfy the measure is the token version, and you found that, as everyone does, because the measure rewards it.
The fix is to measure the outcome you actually wanted, at a slower cadence:
- Not days meditated, but whether you are less reactive this month
- Not days of writing, but words finished or a chapter done
- Not days trained, but a number that moved
Outcomes cannot be gamed by doing two minutes, and they cannot be tracked daily, which is a feature. A weekly or monthly number breaks the streak logic entirely.
Keep a light daily record if it helps you start, and stop treating it as the score.
On the resistance to changing habits because it would break a streak: that is the clearest possible sign the metric has become the goal. The streak is now protecting itself at the expense of the thing it was created to serve, and the honest move is to break it deliberately, this week, to prove to yourself that you can.