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Even those are garbage measures though.

They can be gamed (albeit with a bit more effort), they vary a ton between fields and subfields, and citation rates often reflect the "prestige" of the lab/authors and the trendiness of the topic, rather than the intrinsic "merit" of a paper.

I don't think there's any good automatic proxy for research quality.

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Garbage is a strong word. I think there's definitely a moderate to strong correlation between h-index and quality of researcher. The downside with the h-index is that it also measures your ability to play the 'game' (i.e network, cite your peers, etc.), but I really see no way around that. You can also argue that this is an important skill to have. If you produce the most amazing research in the world and people don't cite you, that could point toward a number of red flags (e.g you're an asshole, your work isn't clear to understand, you don't appropriately cite your peers, etc.)

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