I agree and disagree with your point:
I agree that pure quantity is irrelevant, most of these people (they are known as farmers) run empty boards with lots of ILs for free world records.
I disagree, however, that pure quantity is purely bad. Some runners do not stick to one game, and diversify their skillset across different games and genres, while achieving world class times. Having run against @Akuretaki across many boards, he is very good at the games he plays, but an argument can be made that there are other amazing runners that run one specific series or game.
There used to be a tool updated by Maximum that objectively ranked the top players on the site by quantity of wrs and contention of those wrs using an algorithm, however this site is no longer updated.
It will be a big surprise when somebody wants to take the time to get as many world records as Aku.
There used to be a tool updated by Maximum that objectively ranked the top players on the site
I know what you meant by this but I just want to say, there is no way to "objectively" rank speedrunners across a large number of drastically different games/categories. Even within a single series, or sometimes even a single game, this can be very difficult if not outright impossible to define in a universally agreeable way (I've tried on multiple occasions to play around with a points system for my main series, mostly just to help track my own self-improvement, and I can't even agree with myself on how to measure it, good luck getting 1.7 million other people to also agree). The tool you're referencing was based on objective leaderboard data, but how that data was used to rank players was ultimately a subjective judgement call by the creator.
^ Maximum tried to make it as objective as possible however it was absolutely not objective whatsoever. You can't rank these kinds of things objectively, and in the case of speedstats.app, it was extremely subjective because Maximum only used information from the speedrun.com leaderboards to calculate scores. Information like how long it took someone to get their PB, how difficult the glitches and skips in the run are, or how optimized the run is compared to the runner's SoB are not factored into the calculations.
Well, it wasn't subjective because it was based on limited data, it was subjective because the algorithm they came up with was based on their own personal understanding of what it means to be a good speedrunner. It being based on limited data is a separate issue, although also problematic. But even if you could meaningfully factor in all the relevant data (you can't), it would still be impossible to define "best speedrunner" in a universally agreeable way, nevermind actually creating a ranking system based on that definition that correctly rewards "good" speedrunners and can't be exploited by "bad" speedrunners who only care about the rankings.