Gerrymandering happens because districts are constantly getting redrawn for population changes.

What if we took the opposite approach, and instead of making it so every district had approximately the same population, made it so each representative's vote was weighted by the population of their district? Could then use county boundaries (assuming the number of counties is >= the number of representatives)

Could even weight by # of votes obtained rather than district population, to incentivize being the preferred representative for as many people in your district as possible. I like having a few pro-consensus forces in our politics in a time of polarization.