When I worked as a teaching assistant at my university, we had a mix of knowledge-based questions to which you had to research the correct answers, as well as some questions you had to brainstorm and argue your decision. We didn't grade correct answers, just looked over them to see if the student engaged with the question. In my opinion, those were really easy points to get, especially considering it was one of the hardest courses in the whole study program, but there still were many students who skipped the homework. Now, I've never been able to prove causation (wouldn't even know how), but it turns out that students who solved the homework questions also did well on the exams, and those who seemed to have used some AI chat for the questions did not. And even me telling my students exactly this did not affect the outcome of semester after semester. I believe that lots of guys were just there for the degree and looking to coast by with minimal effort, but for me it always seemed like a big waste of time to go to a university if you're not even going to try to learn something. The first few semesters, I was really frustrated avout this, but as the old saying goes: You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.

Cambridge engineering had something similar called "standard credit" for minor assignments. You'd get the full mark by default, only losing marks if missing or egregiously bad. The exam at the end of each year carried almost all of the grade. It meant you had to engage with the work, but didn't turn it into an exhausting competition for the best coursework grades.

Yes I also had this in Uni at some point. Just going through the homework can be a huge effort. If the course is small enough, you probably don't want to hand in obvious junk/slop, especially if you're asked to present "your" solution.