I've heard this at times but maybe I'm visiting the wrong (right?) kind of events, I've seen mostly people excited to talk about the subject of the conference, or related subjects or meet new people. But I have to say I'm more used to community-run events, smaller events or barcamps - not stuff like excessively large conference frequented mostly by enterprise people who seem a tad less excited .. Java One comes to mind from what I heard...
So yeah, networking plays such a big part that I really prefer to meet people from all over the world (or at least all over Europe) once per year and not from the same pool of ~1000-5000 in my area.
Meetups are usually a lot better for avoiding sales-related phenomena. And they are pretty topical, so you are almost sure to find a few good talks, they are not too long, and very much open ended, so if you bump into someone interesting you don't have to choose between skipping many talks or continue talking.
Most meetups here are 20-50 people (only DevOps Munich usually breaks 100 afaik) so that's not the type of event I meant - but barcamps with up to ~300 are still conference-like without the downsides, imho :)
So yeah, networking plays such a big part that I really prefer to meet people from all over the world (or at least all over Europe) once per year and not from the same pool of ~1000-5000 in my area.