The two are intertwined. Getting into a top tier conference makes your work much more likely to get a high citation count (and thus h-index) regardless of the quality of that work.
Yes, higher quality work means higher chance of getting in, but we'd be naive to assume there's a strong correlation between the two given substantial evidence to the contrary and no clear mechanism to make such a connection.
> Usually researchers doing real SOTA work haven’t even had time for their other work to be cited heavily yet
Weird, I'd say the opposite. How to get high citations: tweak currently popular model/architecture so that it gets SOTA results, place on paperswithcode leaderboard (maybe don't even release code), release paper to arxiv. More datasets you cover, the better. Frankly, SOTA doesn't mean meaningful work. I even say this as an author of SOTA works.
Yes, higher quality work means higher chance of getting in, but we'd be naive to assume there's a strong correlation between the two given substantial evidence to the contrary and no clear mechanism to make such a connection.
> Usually researchers doing real SOTA work haven’t even had time for their other work to be cited heavily yet
Weird, I'd say the opposite. How to get high citations: tweak currently popular model/architecture so that it gets SOTA results, place on paperswithcode leaderboard (maybe don't even release code), release paper to arxiv. More datasets you cover, the better. Frankly, SOTA doesn't mean meaningful work. I even say this as an author of SOTA works.