Back in the time of 3.5" demo disks, I know one group that filled up their disk image with random numbers so it wouldn't compress so it would look bigger and more impressive in file listings.
This seems to be true for writing code generally. Why do something simple when you can show off how complex you can make a project?
I keep seeing tools that should be a for loop inside a script that instead are a sprawling project with all sorts of different files and class hierarchies and abstractions...
One of those arbitrary metrics was bundle size, how many megabytes on the app store was the app. The bigger the better and more serious it was.
At the time I was knee deep in optimizations, using SVGs, doing compression, even bitshifting, to make apps smaller for the companies I worked for. Reducing how many people would be bounced from downloading or installing the app.
And yet, that impressive 12MB app from a venture backed company with hundreds of thousands of users was getting me penalized for taking up so little space
I literally started putting dummy files in the app bundles and it worked for my professional goals. All kinds of premium marketing has similar fictions in them to convey value
so I can emphasize how its the difference between $50/hr upwork gigs inconsistently, and $500,000/yr at Google