I agree that a) rejecting a paper that has been recommended for acceptance by _all_ reviewers (something that routinely happens in, say, NeurIPS) is nonsense. H

I agree that a) rejecting a paper that has been recommended for acceptance by _all_ reviewers (something that routinely happens in, say, NeurIPS) is nonsense. However, in-person conferences have physical limits. In the case of, again, NeurIPS, you may get accepted and _not_ present the paper to an audience. This is also a bit of a travesty. The community would be better off working with established journals so that they take reviews from A* conferences as an informal first round, giving authors a clear path to publication. Even though top conferences will always have their appeal, the writing is on the wall that this model is unsustainable.