This always just feels like negative-sum macho posturing to me. I'm a serious programmer and good at my job, but of course I'd rather have a fruit basket than not have a fruit basket.
It contributes to my happiness, which is ultimately what I care about - productivity is another means to the same end.
> In my experience I’d rather have the investment be prioritised towards more tangible things like additional training.
You talk about things being "prioritised" but I just don't think that matches how these decisions are made. It's not like they're taking money out of some fixed pool (again, at a practical-decision-making level); I see no reason to think that fruit baskets make training less likely. (Indeed I'd say that providing fruit baskets speaks to a willingness to offer cheap-but-effective things, and I'd rather work for somewhere that tried to offer cheap-but-effective training than somewhere that tried to offer expensive training).
This way of management to cultivate “downward looking perspectives” that intentionally belittle or undermine subordinates is a very real and pervasive thing.
A large part of the sociology book Moral Mazes is dedicated to the taxonomy and descriptive analysis of exactly this kind of corporate behavior.