AfD is ugly and quickly becoming completely useless. And it takes up so much of the energy of some of our most intelligent editors. Let's take a one month holiday from it and see what happens. The 5000 or so articles that won't be deleted are only equivalent to three days normal growth.
I don't see how you can refer to 5000 articles that need deletion as being equivalent to something as positive as growth.
What you are forgetting is that such articles can be found by Google and thus by readers. Those 5000 articles will damage not only Wikipedia's credibility, but also use Wikipedia resources.
Also, quite a lot of them would simply be against basic policy, yet not speediable, meaning we'd basically being allowing stuff in against policy, which others would see as a reason to drop in more.
Ignoring a problem won't make it go away.
Mgm