Rest less often?
Nothing in the game requires you to take long rests.
I long rest as little as possible even when my main is a mage. (My first long rest is usually at the Druid Grove after I've defeated the Bugbear assassin and the Harpies.
It's your choice.
If you want your Warlock to shine a little brighter only take long rests after every 5 or 6 encounters.
And that is a BS argument, you are essentially saying gimp your other characters to make your warlock seem balanced. That isn't a meaningful choice in terms of gameplay, that is a meta choice on whether or not you want to play with a self imposed handicap. Yeah, you can polish a turd, but it's still a turd no matter how shiny you make it or how much you wish it were something else.
So you are looking for Larian to "gimp your other characters" because you don't have the self control to not rest after every battle?
By making the choice to have your characters take an 8 hour rest after every 3 minutes of combat you are literally meta-gaming each battle.
Starting a battle with less than full resources isn't a handicap -- it's Dungeons and Dragons.
If you are doing something that is diminishing your game-play enjoyment then stop doing it.
To use your own vernacular, you are the one who is bringing the turd. If you don't like how it smells then stop bringing it.
There is literally a mechanic at play here, it's called short rest. It is there for a reason, and the warlock and monk classes are based around it. Other classes are not gimped if they can't do a full long rest after every combat, they are designed such that they have significantly more resources than monks and warlocks specifically so they can more easily operate between long rests. The current system is essentially tearing out the long rest/short rest class design and not rebalancing the classes that were SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED AND BALANCED on the notion you can only take 1 long rest every 24 hours, but you can have multiple short rests in between.
If you don't think they damaged those classes by breaking the mechanic that they were designed around, well I don't see any point in discussing it with you any further because I really don't think you are terribly familiar with 5e class design.
Your assumption would be incorrect. I've played/DMed 5e since it's inception back when it was originally called D&D Next.
I simply don't require a game to police my actions.
You don't
have to rest after each encounter, you
choose to.
In BG3 you can take short rests after every couple of encounters and long rests after every 6th encounter and class balance is maintained.
You
choose to break the D&D mechanics when you
choose to rest after each combat -- that's on you, not the game.
