Right. The whole business of counting fouls is silly.
Naismith was a miracle worker in terms of inventing a game, basketball, which had IMMEDIATE impact around the country and around the world. But Naismith (and the other early authorities in the game, who made changes in the rules before 1920), designed a foul-containment system that did not stand the test of time. Not wanting players to foul, wanting to discourage the practice of committing fouls, they created a compromise system which tried to contain fouling in two different ways: 1, by counting the fouls against each player and eliminating the player from the game when he committed too many fouls, and 2, by giving the other team a FREE shot--an unguarded shot--when a foul was committed.
But the compromise eroded constantly going forward in time. First, they stopped shooting a lot of fouls because it was just a nuisance, and ever since then we have been locked in an evolutionary guessing game about which fouls to shoot and which ones not to shoot and which ones were 1 shot and which were 1-and-1 and which were 2 shot fouls and which were 2 chances to make 3 and which were 3 shots period. More significantly than that, when the game started the PPP (points per possession) were low enough that giving a player a FREE (unguarded) shot at the basket was giving them significant compensaiton for the foul committed against them. But as the points scored per possession without a foul increased, the unguarded shot replacing a possession became a questionable benefit, so that giving a team one free throw rather than allowing the possession to continue uninterrupted was a questionable benefit, and sometimes a clear negative. This became one of the things necessitating a re-adjustment of when you shoot a foul and when you don't. But my essential point here is that a point was reached by 1950 when an unguarded free shot was no longer preferable for the offense to simply allowing the possession to continue, hence was not a meaningful cost imposed on the team committing the foul.
And the other half of the penalty--5 fouls and you are out of the game--that also diminished somewhat in force, as the rotation of players used in a game gradually increased from 5--the 5 starters basically play the whole game--increased from 5 to 7 or 8, effectively increasing the allowable ratio of fouls per minute played.
As the deterrence to fouls decreased, certain defensive practices which would have been called fouls became so common that they were no longer called fouls. There are LOTS of things that defenders do now that would have been called fouls in the 1950s, essentially beccause the penalties for doing these things were ineffective.
My suggestion: there should NEVER be an incentive for fouling--and the way to get rid of them is obvious. If you commit a foul, the other team gets a point (if the foul was committed by the defense) or loses the possession (if it was committed by the offense.) And that's all. You don't cancel the rest of the offensive possession because the defense commits a foul; that makes NO sense. That way, there is never a benefit to the team committing the foul, therefore never an incentive to foul, and therefore there is no reason to count the number of fouls committed by each player. Since fouling always hurts the team committing the foul, it is simply up to the coach as to weigh the negative costs of the foul. It solves completely the problem that the game has been TRYING unsuccessfully to solve by jiggling the foul shots between zero, one, one-and-one, two, two chances to make 3, and 3.