A Ph.D.'s worth of first authored NeurIPS/ICML papers will get you a very good job pretty easily still. But AI slices papers very thin and author lists are inflated relative to other subfields of CS. A single paper in one of the major conferences is a pretty marginal contribution, especially if you're in the middle of a long author list.

Also, NeurIPS reviewing has gone to absolute hell. I mean, peer review everywhere has problems. But I've never seen something quite this bad. At this point I think it's safe to say that most reviewers wouldn't even make it to an on-site interview for a faculty position at a research university. That's definitely nowhere near normal. You can't really blame anyone, I guess; the community is growing way too quickly for any real quality control.

Frankly, I think those conferences have outlived their usefulness as anything except marquee marketing events. I'm now mostly attending smaller and more specialized conferences.