In some ways, it kind of is a sham. I think it is perpetuated by the blog/youtube style programming knowledge transference paradigm. Those mediums are fine but there seems to be a rallying cry against actually learning anything about computing in anything other than bite size pieces and thus get a lot of fad driven movements and an over population of redundant frameworks and libraries.
Yes, and then because companies start using NoSQL or whatever for problems they could have done fine in mysql they start asking for NoSQL experts when they are hiring.
This makes devs think that they need NoSQL experience and therefor they will find ways to shoehorn NoSQL into whatever problems they are currently solving.
I think it's more perpetuated by the fact that executives and other corporate-folk are easily hypnotized by numbers, however irrelevant they may be. "Interestingly, peak purchases for our product in March occurred Monday through Friday between 7am and 4:30pm, with 807 people looked at page x before purchasing and 806 people looking at page y. Through running our data against national averages, we've found that our peak purchasing times align and are roughly proportionate to population density across the country." You can watch in amazement as every MBA in the room's eyes gloss over; a dopey smile overcomes them slowly as the data intoxicates them.
Throw in a line graph and a heat map and you're basically on a fast track to a promotion without even saying a single useful thing.
