You strike a key point here: There move to more clearly delineate maker/editor roles is very sane, but there are a few things that needed to be done before introducing this restriction on Editors.
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Make Doc Makers the only ones able to: write formulas, insert controls and buttons, insert (smart) tables, hide and unhide pages, set up and edit automations
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Make Doc Locking (which was a band-aid solution that we now seem stuck with), available to all doc Makers no matter which pricing tier.
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More controversial but necessary in my opinion: add dumb tables, and allow doc Editors to insert dumb tables inside canvas columns. Hec maybe even allow doc Editors to insert formulas and smart tables inside canvas columns but only be able to use objects created within the canvas in their formulas.
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Let Editors be Content Editors only as mentioned by @Scott_Collier-Weir here, so they can only edit the text of pages that the doc Maker leaves unlocked for them to edit, but can’t remove/add formulas, controls, buttons and automations , even in unlocked pages.
The above will transition us will transition us from the current messy set up to a world where Makers make, Editors edit content, and Viewers view !
I admit that this transition was not possible in the first iteration of pricing tiers , because we didn’t have canvas columns in Coda 2.0. But it’s not too late to fix the mess!
Then, can come cherry on the cake, your proposal: rows as pages. This will be essentially a new, and very cool, view of a table (just like like layout, calendar, timeline) , which is displayed as top-level header page (text editable by Maker), and the table rows as child pages displayed as a layout view.
We can have a self-referencing parent column act similar to the dependency column in Timeline views, so that we can have a full blown hierarchy - similar to what we can achieve now with vanilla pages.
And there you have it, sane and clean wikis with formulaic access to boot.
Only once you have all of this, you can restrict Editors from inserting new pages and no one would complain.