They were a thing in the 90's and 00's for some K-12 events as fallout from the children's excessive self-esteem building movement. They usually took the form of cheap little ribbons rather than trophies. I always thought they were insulting and reminders of losing so I threw them away.
We had them in the 1980s in elementary school, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_trophy says the practice is over a century old, and the "backlash against participation trophies intensified in the 1990s."
There's no need to take my work for it. The Arlington Heights Daily Herald Suburban Chicago (1975-11-28) article at https://archive.org/details/arlington-heights-daily-herald-s... describes how every soccer team member at a high school got a participation trophy.
Speaking of ribbons, the same Wikipedia page points out "the US military has awarded ribbons to anyone who participates in surface combat".
"I spent a year at Microsoft working on Windows 3.1. During that time, I received three team T-shirts, a team rugby shirt, a team beach towel, and a team mouse pad. I also took part in a team train ride and a nice dinner on the local "Dinner Train" and another dinner at a nice restaurant. If I had been an employee, I would also have received a few more shirts, a Microsoft watch, a plaque for participating in the project, and a big Lucite "Ship-It" award for shipping the project. The total value of this stuff is probably only two or three hundred dollars, but as Tom Peters and Robert Waterman say, companies with excellent motivation don't miss any opportunity to shower their employees with nonmonetary rewards."
