Unfortunately, when managers expect a certain throughput, solutions like this often appear. I saw similar systems when I was a patent examiner at the USPTO. From what I recall being told, the USPTO's "form paragraphs" started out in the DOS era as some WordPerfect macros developed by an examiner, not management. Management defined the quota and examiners came up with creative solutions to meet the quota.

These solutions are symptoms of a broken system. I would not judge the people working within the system for using these solutions (edit: unless someone's quality is exceptionally bad like academic fraudsters as a academics work in a similar metrics-driven environment). Management (and politicians in the case of the USPTO) created the incentives that are the real problem.

Automation like this can be useful to enhance quality, but in my experience at the USPTO, there was a lot of automation they could have used to enhance quality, but they didn't. The incentives to improve speed are far stronger than the incentives to improve quality.