The issue is this:
Poster A (this could be me) says "the game encounter guidelines create laughably easy combats"
Poster B (who will remain nameless) counters "you're not using enough encounters. Try 6-8"
Poster A sighs at the well-meaning but far too generic advice
The real solutions, of course, are to acknowledge the game rules are way too inflexible to work for those of us that aren't blessed with a perfect ability to come up with a compelling 6-8 encounter day, every day of the week.
Such as, I don't know, pretty much
every single published 5e module ever written...!
The rules would have been vastly better IF the PHB explitly laid the power to grant rests in the hands of the DM or scenario writer, rather than uneqivocally stating "you can take a long rest to end the day". At the very least saying "the rate of rests vary with the adventure's needs". Or have a DMG variant that puts the issue to its final rest: "you can only short-rest after every other encounter and you can only long-rest after two short rests"
IF the DMG was set up acknowledging many of us like fewer more meaningful encounters than more rote ones, and the consequences thereof: guidelines on how to tweak the balance between short resters and long resters: "if your campaign is a wilderness hexcrawl where heroes very rarely have more than three encounters in a day..." or "if you simply dislike routine non-challenging fights and thus skip the easy/medium ones to save time..."
At the very least we wouldn't have had all these endless discussions where people insist "just do 6-8 encounters"
Thank god this thread exists. Now I shall always point to it every time I get that particular pearl of wisdom.