Let's put it this way, R9 definitely had the highest density of good and outrageous plays.
And assists are also a terrible metric for that.
In each football match, there are roughly 60 minutes of football. Even in a highscoring match, maybe 1 minute of that is dedicated to the scoring of goals. The rest of a football match are other actions. So how are goals the main part of football?
There's also a huge difference between a goal and a goal record. A game is won by goals, yes, but a "goal scored" is only the last touch before the ball passed the line. It says nothing about who made the most important plays in the sequence that lead to the ball passing the line. And it says nothing about all the plays that lead to this goal being important - defending, ball retention, build up, etc. You don't care about the 1:5 or 2:5, do you? And it also tells you nothing about the great plays by players that didn't lead to goals because somebody else fecked up. Football is such a beautiful sport and you reduce it to something that superficial.
And a) scorers don't automatically get paid the most and b) payment doesn't correlate 1 to 1 how important or difficult to replace a player is or how much better he makes the team, even if the decision makers could quantify his impact. In fact, the payment is more down to what people like you and me think is the most important and the more people think like you (goals = best), the more they get paid because people want to watch them play.