That is cargo cult level behaviour. They know that software with lots of tests tend to have few bugs, so let's automatically have lots of tests!
I just hope whatever you were building wasn't critical to human lives.
One person's "cargo cult behavior" is another person's "best practices". :P
My favorite example is automatically generated documentation. The kind that merely repeats the name of the method, the names and types of arguments, and the type of return value. The ironic part is that this is later used as an evidence that all documentation is useless. Uhm, how about documenting the methods where something is not obvious, and leaving the obvious ones (getters, setters) alone? But then the documentation coverage checker would return a number smaller than 100% and someone would freak out...
This is just one of many examples, of course.
Like "give review feedback that this code isn't doing the right thing" -> "change the test to make it pass, not change the code to make it work". And it wasn't really a small case where you could plausibly do that and still understand what you were trying to do.
Coincidentally that was a few weeks after I saw a comment here on HN about someone who hired someone from Facebook, and the guy would change the tests so he could push to production, rather than fixing the bug that the tests pointed out ...
So yes it happens.
Can't blame him, he moved fast and broke things /s
I remember once, using some in-house software, which for god knows why could not log it's errors back to the IT department. Instead, they relied on users to call up IT, or email them with the error. To make it more fun for users, each error message contained a humorous haiku.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.