You can pay someone the exact same target-compensation, while still shifting it away from cash, and towards stock. For example, giving someone a stock grant of 1000 shares of GOOG, instead of paying them $1.1M in cash.
There are still issues with this approach, although they're a bit more subtle. Think about Valeant circa 2015 -- definitely taking a short term approach of acquiring and stripping pharma companies, which did positively impact their stock price. But, they did it in an unsustainable manner.
