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Wow, this proposed approach to drawing districts without gerrymandering is fascinating! In the spirit of "I cut you choose", the proposal is "One party defines 2N equal-population sub-districts, and the other party chooses pairs of adjacent sub-districts to combine, to form N districts."
The analysis in the body of the paper focuses on simulations of each party's optimal strategy in the context of some real-world maps of US voting precincts, while an appendix proves a few theorems giving bounds in the alternate context where the pairs of districts that get combined don't need to be geographically adjacent. (If this idea catches on, I'd bet someone will produce theoretical bounds in the presence of the geography constraint.)
A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering: The Define–Combine Procedure
This is cool, but may not satisfy all legal requirements.
Although a lot of the weird maps you see are due to various biases, occasionally, some of them are actually a result of the civil rights regulations.
99% invisible did an episode on this:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/gerrymandering/
A more detailed link:
@beetle_b There is a whole section of the linked paper on VRA compatibility.