It definitely isn't prevalent, and usually is for "feature" pieces (like an expose on the Washington Post back when they were a real newspaper), along with product pages.
Apple uses it for their various pages, and it is legitimately annoying-
Tesla is a fan as well-
Occasionally sites use lazy loaded images, and do a "fade in" effect when they're actually loaded. Nothing wrong with that particular use.
> https://www.tesla.com/models
Love how that page takes almost 10 seconds to load for the first time on a 200Mbps connection