Grant that the obsession people have with citing everything - even basic stuff that everyone knows, like old poetry - is quite absurd. Just put it in italics or quotation marks or something. Either people are smart enough to figure it out, or they're too stupid.
That being said, I think there is the broader issue of discoverability. As a practical matter, it's very convenient, if I have a paper on X, that I can look at the citations and get good links to resources on Y. This isn't really a matter of making the author of this or that paper happy either, it's about giving the reader some useful information.
And I just don't see how to replicate that without citations.
That's not to say the social science style (Davis, 1953) isn't obnoxious, though - there it really seems (Johnson, 2010) to be more about name-dropping the big guys (Smith, 2007), than about putting a small unobtrusive number in a superscript.
That being said, I think there is the broader issue of discoverability. As a practical matter, it's very convenient, if I have a paper on X, that I can look at the citations and get good links to resources on Y. This isn't really a matter of making the author of this or that paper happy either, it's about giving the reader some useful information.
And I just don't see how to replicate that without citations.
That's not to say the social science style (Davis, 1953) isn't obnoxious, though - there it really seems (Johnson, 2010) to be more about name-dropping the big guys (Smith, 2007), than about putting a small unobtrusive number in a superscript.