[Al-Khwarizmi]

> However, at least in my neck of the woods (i.e. Europe), almost all gates and gatekeepers for you as a PhD student, and later postdoc, are checking your research.

While I'm also in Europe, my bet is that this is universal and won't change in the foreseeable future.

The reason is that teaching is practically impossible to evaluate. How do you quantitatively measure which professors provide high-quality teaching? By grades? No, easiest course wins. By employability? No, it depends a lot on the field, a philosophy professor can be amazing but that won't create jobs in philosophy. Student polls? Correlation with actual quality is really weak, and I say this as someone who has good polls - there is a strong influence of difficulty as well as the subject itself (a CS student will almost always prefer programming to physics, and it's not the physics professor's fault), apart from gender bias.

In my country they try to give an equal weight to teaching equally with respect to research in applications for positiosn and tenure, but since there is no realistic metric, the bulk of the score ends up being about "years teaching" or "number of hours taught" which is the only objective number that they can come up with. So it becomes basically a seniority factor and since your seniority is what it is and preparing high-quality lectures won't give you more hours or years, the outcome is still that focusing too much on teaching is bad for your career.