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.
I 100% agree with this comment. In fact, it is very common to receive reviews at top conference which say "you should submit to a smaller/more specialized venue". Those "more specialized" conference are indeed both more interesting AND less valued by universities. Sometimes universities will not even agree to pay the travel cost to supposedly "smaller" conferences!
Another issue I have observed is that, exactly like the article highlights, conference reviewing has become about rejecting papers and not accepting them: there are too many decent papers! This is very perverse because it may only take a negative review from an unfamiliar reviewer to get a paper rejected. And even if your paper is considered decent, it will often be necessary for at least one reviewer to "champion" your article. This means that if your paper happens to be reviewed by one of the "top researcher" in your field, this person not championing your paper is a death sentence. And if for some reason this researcher does not like your work, you just have to pray that they will not review your paper. But of course, reviewers get to bid on the papers that they want to review so this person is very likely to review your paper every time.
All of this means that in our modern conference system, the role of few loud gatekeepers is highly exaggerated and they get to shape a lot the output of "top conferences". This is really more of human problem, but the lack of hierarchy in academia means that those people can get their way without major opposition for a long time...
Note of course that this is *highly* dependent on the field that your work in. There are still many fields of CS with very reasonable community.
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.
Another issue I have observed is that, exactly like the article highlights, conference reviewing has become about rejecting papers and not accepting them: there are too many decent papers! This is very perverse because it may only take a negative review from an unfamiliar reviewer to get a paper rejected. And even if your paper is considered decent, it will often be necessary for at least one reviewer to "champion" your article. This means that if your paper happens to be reviewed by one of the "top researcher" in your field, this person not championing your paper is a death sentence. And if for some reason this researcher does not like your work, you just have to pray that they will not review your paper. But of course, reviewers get to bid on the papers that they want to review so this person is very likely to review your paper every time.
All of this means that in our modern conference system, the role of few loud gatekeepers is highly exaggerated and they get to shape a lot the output of "top conferences". This is really more of human problem, but the lack of hierarchy in academia means that those people can get their way without major opposition for a long time...
Note of course that this is *highly* dependent on the field that your work in. There are still many fields of CS with very reasonable community.