As an academic (unrelated to this journal and field), I’ve more or less stopped accepting to review papers because of the low reward… that is, there are virtually no incentives to me as a professor to do this and it takes a lot of time to do proper reviews. I have better things to do with my time.

I attended an ACM webinar some years ago on the topic of open access, and while the OA fees weren’t as high as this one, I asked how they could defend these fees… the answers weren’t entirely satisfactory to me — in general they claimed obviously admin costs, but also that such funds were used to support other well-meaning things ACM deals with such as scholarships/workshops etc for young and female researchers among other things… Personally, while these are good things for ACM to support, I dislike the somewhat arbitrary connection to OA publishing… PS: I’m not sure if this is still their policy.