Although widespread recourse to this tactic of laziness would make for very short citation half-lives, my impression is that the practice is spreading: I expect soon to see work from The Origin of Species attributed to a contemporary researcher in the form "Natural selection is known to lead to the survival of the fittest (Smith 2002)." Both this practice and the "But see" one should be recognized and criticized for what they are: serious departures from ethical standards of science.
When the whole flap over forging data occurred in the United States back in the 1980s, the blue ribbon panel formed at Harvard University to address the problem concluded that this was due, in part, to the fact that people were not doing master's theses anymore. So there was no one trying to reproduce others' experiments systematically.
The answer would be to put rigor back in to the training process.
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