I believe paper length restriction are a historic artefact, needed to keep printing and shipping of proceedings low. It can have a side effect harming the community: if we run out of space, and lets face it, we do most of the time, we have the choice between cutting our contents or the bibliography. Usually we remove references from the latter. As citation counts are used as quality criterium, reducing numbers of citations hurts authors and the community.
At ECRTS, we moved to excluding the non technical parts of a paper, notably, the bibliography from counting towards paper length. Easy fix with positive impact on the community.
Björn Brandenburg, as TPC chair of ECRTS 21, introduced Flexible Page Limit alltogether:
“We believe that scientists should focus on the content of their papers, rather than worry about formatting tricks and layout micro-optimizations to squeeze the last few paragraphs under a given hard page limit. Authors should invest their time into making papers better and more appealing to readers, not into fighting LaTeX to comply with arbitrary page limits. Rather than policing formatting violations “with an iron fist,” the flexible page limit is aimed at reducing the incentive for space hacks in the first place.
To be clear, concision is a hallmark of good academic writing, and authors are still expected to make every effort to keep their conference papers as brief as possible to best serve readers. The flexible page limit is intended to take the stress out of the last couple of sentences spilling onto an extra page, not to invite excessive amounts of content that clearly exceed the limits of a conference paper.”
An interesting idea, I look forward to learning how it worked out.