World-class papers with >1000 authors are routinely published by large scientific collaborations like CMS, ATLAS, and LIGO.
Very true, but if you consider things like "The ATLAS Collaboration" to be one (very composite) author, I think GP's reasoning has some merit. There is a lot of homogeneity in a collaboration author like that, so it's a reasonable thing to do. (Also, speaking from experience, most people in the collaboration paid no attention to the paper, unless it was a Big One.)