The alternative is to encourage people to not overdo follow-ups. Those with a strong moral compass with understand your words and play fair, others won’t. This will place the former group at a severe disadvantage. The only practical way to level the playing field is what the article suggests.

Edit: now that I come to think of it, another potential solution might be to encourage the people who receive a lot of emails/messages to ignore follow-ups and only recognize the first piece of communication that was sent to them.