Most people do actually judge by citations rather than raw pubs. It's an open secret that you can shove out papers (acceptance to any venue, regardless of the quality of the work is probabilistic) with enough effort. Getting cites is harder (other than self-cites which is a seperate issue).

When I look up a researcher first thing I look at is their number of citations and H-10 index, then I look through their top papers (the ones that have been cited a lot). As far as I know hiring committees also care about these things.

Of course it isn't the only thing that matters, or the most important, but its much more useful than raw number of papers published.