Any good frameworks for individual performance evaluation for software devs?

One of the most difficult things I've had to do is find some qualitative way of judging my devs' performance.

Other fields can have things like sales quotas, or widgets that come off the line.

But software development is knowledge work and a lot of their work doesn't have any useful metrics. Lines of code can be gamed and indicates worse performance (imho). Git commits can be gamed. Story points can be gamed. Ticket count isn't fair. Timelines, deadlines, and requirements change based on external forces. Bug count assumes that there are bugs in their code and that bugs are reported/discovered.

A lot of frameworks like DORA are focused on team health rather than individual performance, so it's not super useful here.

Thus far, I've had to use the "I know it when I see it" test, based purely on my own experience as a dev. That doesn't quite hold up when the powers that be need me to justify why I checked "exceeds expectations". I end up just making up some bullshit to satisfy the paperwork, but that's not helpful when it comes to coaching.

What do you guys use to judge performance?