I occasionally get listed as a co-author on papers where I feel my contribution has been very minimal. At first I objected, but apparently it is a thing in Academia to list absolutely everybody who had any involvement at all with the research.
Maybe this isn't what you meant, but it's not a thing in all fields in academia. Pure math for example is generally pretty careful about authorship, and so is cs theory, for the same reasons. Not coincidentally both fields use alphabetical author order instead of contributional.
