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This was common in the hard sciences way back when. I remember fellow students saying things like: "I have my three papers, that's three chapters, now I just need my intro and conclusions." In psychology, they had a phrase, which was: "Published and outa here."

Some advantages: It meant your work was demonstrably publishable, you got 3 pubs out of it. Disadvantages: You were basically a hostage until your advisor agreed to let you publish 3 papers. It probably tended to flood the literature with papers of lesser quality.

Unless (like me) you write your papers in org-mode too!

I doubt that anyone can be familiar with "most theses in computer science these days".

Depends on your threshold for "familiarity". Anyone currently working on theirs will likely have a number of friends/colleagues working on ones of their own, include second and third hand knowledge accumulated from conferences and likely any modestly sociable CS doctoral candidate would know at least the loose structure, if not 30 second blurb of quite a large number of theses in progress.

That is very much dependent on department.