Duplicative footnotes 
While I definitely strongly oppose some experimental and fragile technical "fix", I think the regular work of editing is very relevant.  In particular, without having carefully reviewed it myself, I strongly suspect that we have a large number of mostly redundant references.  A source we use in one section might be perfectly adequate to support a fact we state in a different section.  As often as that is the case, we can remove one of the references, and just refer to it in both places.  This takes some real editorial work, but I would not be at all surprised if such work could eliminate 1/3 or even 1/2 of the references as redundant, while still keeping the article well compliant with WP:RS and WP:CITE.  This cleanup can, of course, be done incrementally by as many editors who want to help. ×talk