are you speaking from experience here? i have had several internships, and at each one they let me fix a couple trivial bugs in production before giving me a toy project they have no intention of actually using. my peers have had very similar experiences. i would actually have loved to be given a full engineer's assignment.
No, not really personal experience, due to age I am way past any internship or apprenticeship possible offer, but I have (much younger than me) cousins and sons of friends that went into the stuff (a couple still are).
Also, you are speaking about a very definite field (I presume software engineer or similar), while I was more broadly speaking, an internship at - say - a legal firm or - still say - an accounting firm or other "generic" office, where internships usually (not always) revolve around data entering, making photocopies and similar.
Internship (what was once called apprenticeship) made (and makes) a lot of sense where the employer supplies knowledge (arts and crafts being a typical example), nowadays to actually be considered for an internship you need to have a full, recognized cycle of uni-level study (which is the thing that in theory should have already provided you with all the knowledge - bar the experience - needed for your profession).
One thing is having a (lower paid but with "full dignity") entry-level job, and another is having "stages", "internships" and similar, where very often the young people is not actually taught anything and are just a replacement for generic secretarial or similar activities.