Seen exactly the same, sadly not just in one shop. Half completed stories would be split into part 1,2,3, or worse: renamed to "Attempt to implement...", just to make the burndown chart align at closure of sprint and give people the pleasure of dragging items to the done-column. Didn't get better when some higher up scrum master once had the brilliant idea that all stories should be max 2 story point large, otherwise need to be refined further. Together with a company-wide policy that a story point is roughly equal to one day, for all teams, because it made the high level jira dashboards easier to aggregate.

Not sure what it was meant for, since with this practice it would tautologically just show headcount * days in a sprint. More like time reporting rather than measure of progress.