When I was a PhD student around the turn of the millennium, SIGGRAPH, despite being the top venue in visual computing, is considered as a conference and thus the published technical papers received a lower count/weight than journal papers in traditional academic rating.
To remedy this problem, starting from 2002 SIGGRAPH technical papers were published as special issues of ToG (ACM Transactions on Graphics), which is a journal.
Now, about 20 years later, people were concerned about the author workload and review speed for ToG, compared to some machine learning and computer vision conferences which tend to have lower requirement for evaluation and faster review/publication cycles.
To remedy this problem, starting from 2022 SIGGRAPH will start accepting a conference-track of papers.
This is one example of the general phenomena where people repeat cycles of identifying problems, devising solutions, causing other (sometimes previous) problems, ad infinitum.
Update: Aaron Hertzmann (the main architect for the conference track) has a recent post about expectation creep that is worth taking a look.
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