Personally, I'm totally averse to any sort of coded in encounters/rest rule.
Yeah, you're not alone.
But I can't help but think this is because your players unconsciously/voluntarily play along, fulfilling the 6-8 expectation by themselves.
That's not really a solution. That's just wishful thinking. The DMG should not get away with just dropping "oh by the way, make 6-8 encounters happen, I don't know how, but good luck".
To me, the number one mechanism for limiting rests is Wandering Monsters.
Apart from not really working (as demonstrated by the rest of the thread) this assumes a dungeon setting.
I have already identified dungeons as the only place where the 6-8 thing comes even close to working.
But what about wilderness adventures? hexcrawls? social intrigue?
Wizards most recent adventure contains (no spoilers) a wilderness trek that can take up to 36 days. The official guidelines is to roll for random encounters twice a day. There are a couple of set-piece encounters, but for perhaps 30 out of those 36 days you will end up with 0, 1 or 2 encounters daily, with absolutely no discussion on limiting long rests in between.
I can fix this. You can fix this.
That is completely beside the point.
The point is: if you run D&D 5th Edition by the book, the 6-8 encounter recommendation is
blown completely and utterly out of the water. There is absolutely
nothing to ensure or even help the DM to make this happen.
My point isn't that you or I can't make it work. My point is that none of the actual solutions is in the DMG! Every good piece of advice has one thing in common: it's coming from you, my fellow DMs.
Not from the DMG.
Not from the game itself.
You might not like hard-coding "two encounters per rest" minimums.
But why isn't this discussed in the DMG?
I might not believe wandering monsters disrupt resting.
But why isn't this discussed in the DMG?
Somebody else might suggest you can't long rest during long voyages, only at the beginning and at the end, forcing you to plot a course that stops at every available port/oasis/village.
But why isn't this discussed in the DMG?
Why isn't this discussed in the DMG?