Sure, but when you see someone holding up a lav mic between their thumb and forefinger, that's not audio engineering; that has to be social signaling, or perhaps uninformed mimicry.
It's a massive trend all over IG and TikTok these days as there's a lot of mobile-friendly consumer gear that brings your Social Media Content up a fairly large way for fairly low cost. Ironically, the mimicry probably spreads because those that know what they're doing partially or fully conceal it which is by definition less likely to be noticed and therefore imitated by first timers/novices.