It was always sort of funny to me to have our ten game soccer season of "we don't keep score" followed by the top performers advancing to playoffs, including a championship.
"We don't keep score, there's no winners and losers, but if we win this game we make the postseason."
Yeah, I don't see what's wrong with a souvenir to remember the season by. That's not coddling kids, it's just giving them a trinket that will hopefully bring back nice memories. Amateur adult teams do the same thing in the form of t-shirts etc.
I agree that this has been blown out of proportion, as csydas said in the parent comment. Criticising participation trophies is mostly a way for certain people to signal that they don't buy in to "all that millennial snowflake bullshit". How much harm can it really do?
Having said all that, having to play soccer while secretly keeping score does sound crazy!
I received a 16th place ribbon in a cross country race in middle school. I thought it was silly but my Dad kept it for a long time. I don't think everyone got a ribbon, though. Maybe the top 20.
More broadly, though, I definitely remember ignoring all of this stuff as a kid. We weren't allowed to keep score during soccer games because it "wasn't about winners and losers". (One wonders why we were playing a competitive sport, then.) Not just "score wasn't kept" but "get in trouble if you're heard talking about score".
So... we had to keep score when coaches and refs weren't in earshot. That was the entirety of the result. If anything, it sort of felt like something we did to protect the fragile adults! After all, the winners still made fun of the losers every game, nothing had changed, but now the adults didn't have to see it happen.