It seemed obvious to me that those comments weren’t extolling any merit of the “two papers per year” heuristic, but instead were just cynically resigned to the

It seemed obvious to me that those comments weren’t extolling any merit of the “two papers per year” heuristic, but instead were just cynically resigned to the fact that that’s just the reality of it (good or bad) and so someone pursuing tenure has to be planning on dealing with being evaluated that way (even if it’s a bad practice generally).