Still the basic idea is you should show up regularly, but sometimes I had to skip a couple of days and could get back on track by just doing my average number of repetitions plus 20% or something of the like for a while.
A big problem in general comes from the fact that an SRS is a big investment of time and people will get extremely defensive to “protect their investment”. It’s very difficult to get fair comparisons and good recommendations, I almost never got to try SuperMemo because I was just reading comments of defensive Anki users.
Unfortunately memory does not work that way. You can't just put a pause on forgetting (if we could we wouldn't need spaced repetition in the first place). The backlog will continue to grow because memory degrades over time (without review). The backlog simply represents the cards that have a less than X% chance of being recalled (where X is usually 80-90%).