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

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.