Note how the author talks about "main conferences", "major conferences", and "top conferences". That's the root issue. Whenever there is prestige available, people will compete for it. And if you have a competition, you should formalize the rules to make it fair.
When I was doing PhD ~15 years ago, I noticed that I rarely cited work that appeared in the top conferences of the subfield. Those conferences covered so wide range of topics that often only 1 or 2 papers were in the same subsubfield as me. And even those were often not directly relevant to my work.
But then there were small specialized conferences that had plenty of interesting papers every year. I left CS for another field a decade ago, but I still regularly attend some of those conferences and review for them. The papers published in them are still interesting and relevant to my work.
jltsiren•55m ago
When I was doing PhD ~15 years ago, I noticed that I rarely cited work that appeared in the top conferences of the subfield. Those conferences covered so wide range of topics that often only 1 or 2 papers were in the same subsubfield as me. And even those were often not directly relevant to my work.
But then there were small specialized conferences that had plenty of interesting papers every year. I left CS for another field a decade ago, but I still regularly attend some of those conferences and review for them. The papers published in them are still interesting and relevant to my work.