Bingo, having just left a mega-corp this is the status-quo of a lot of projects I had visibility into - take a trivial task, estimate it at 8-13 story points (i.e. the whole 2 week sprint), have nobody question the estimates, complete the story in 1-2 days and then chill for the other 8-9 days left in the sprint. It was pretty much an open secret.
...and nobody gets faulted by management, because they completed the story in the time they committed to.
On the other hand, if you had estimated the task at 3 days, and it ends up taking 5, you would get dinged for it. Estimate the same task at 13 story points, even if it was really only a 3, you were rewarded for meeting estimates - its a very perverse incentive structure.
Sure, with startups on the bleeding edge and with RnD it's different, but most of devs aren't doing that
Some high-paid consultants got paid a lot of money to sell it to the CEO, who then mandates it....so we are stuck with it ...until those same consultants have some other methodology-du-jour to sell.
I saw a lot of questionable tactics stem from this. It's like when you play capture the flag, and focus on the "KDR" metric, as is often done.
Critical people who were saving the teams life and working their fucking asses off would get grilled and questioned; not intentionally, but as a natural extension of these processes. Meanwhile, people that scored easy points would get a pat on the head, then sit silently during the sprint review; thankful that they got the easy path this sprint.
It got to the point of absurdity. I think it could make sense to look at sprint points during planning, but then the total bank of points goes to the team; who scored what should be anonymous... this was one of those ideas you have that you know you can never share, lol.