[bsder]

It depends what you are optimizing for.

Number of publications is a proxy for how much funding a professor can generate. Not much else.

> "Most papers are filler in retrospect" and "conferences need to accept a decent number of papers so that people will show up and cover the costs of the meeting"

None of these are conflicting. Conferences are often more about networking than the papers. Many paper are filler, but often only in retrospect. They are not obviously filler when presented.