> What would a system that rewards people for quality rather than volume look like?

Hiring and tenure review based on a candidate’s selected 5 best papers.

Already standard practice at a few enlightened places, I think. (of course this also probably increases the review workload for top venues)

To a lesser extent, bean-counting metrics like citations and h-index are an attempt to quantify non-volume-based metrics. (for non-academics, h-index is the largest N such that your N-th most cited paper has >= N citations)

Note that most approaches like this have evolved to counter “salami-slicing”, where you divide your work into “minimum publishable units”. LLMs are a different threat - from my selfish point of view, one of the biggest risks is that it takes less time to write a bogus paper with an LLM than it does for a single reviewer to review it. That threatens to upend the entire peer reviewing process.