Alternately, it captures a bit of so many things (tech-debt in codebase, mental health of team, task risks) that it's best to avoid trying to link it to any one thing.

The past X weeks of point-estimates is what you use to forecast which things fit in the next Y weeks, and you can't have both stability and forecast accuracy. Any attempt to permanently "peg" a point to a certain number of man-hours is going to interfere with that accuracy.

I had a manager institute PERT estimations for every task/sticky, which was interesting but not necessarily worth it.

In the end, the work takes the time it takes, and nobody knows how long that will be ahead of time. Fiddling around with estimates helps with ranking but not prediction.