Surely you mean the number of publications, or some other superficial metric (e.g. being the third "supervising" author on a paper with a dozen authors).

If I read a paper and have a great appreciation for the ideas, and have a sense that an author contributed significantly to the aspects I appreciate (either from explicit descriptions of the authors' contributions in the publication, or by speaking to them), why would that not be impressive to me?

I work with a group that got a pretty ground-breaking tech paper published in a top medical journal. They estimated it generated $100M in investment for the group. Over 2-3 years. I think the original investment for the work that produced the paper was about $1M. FWIW.

I beg to differ. Publications are impressive because they are, in the very least, an indicator of the volume of work that a research group does in a domain. Writing a paper requires time and effort and, more importantly, focused work. As anyone who works and ever worked on academia is able to tell you, finding time to do anything of value, whether is exploring a new idea or continue working on any of the ideas you might have floating around, is the biggest challenge.