I turned into dead weight once during a hostile takeover of the company I was working for. It was pretty shit, and I'm glad I moved on after a few months of being unproductive. Management removed our ability to move forward on any existing work, and allocated no new work, and rejected any proposals from anyone from the 'old' company.
Wound up spending most of my (remote) work day occasionally checking my work laptop for emails, working on personal projects on my personal laptop and gardening or doing some DIY fixes on our old house.
Felt bad the entire time and finding a new job was a huge weight off my shoulders.
Through a weird sequence of events, a group of us ended up working through a consulting company re-billing arrangement for a large financial services company that was closing our office. The “suits” needed us on payroll to feel secure that our code would keep working, so we got promised our annual bonus (substantial) if we worked until X date. The tech leaders at HQ hated that we existed at all and so gave us no work. We might have worked 40 hours in 4.5 months (total, not per week).
Bonuses eventually hit our account and we all resigned serially; literally a line outside the manager’s door waiting to resign.
It sucked; was so bad that one colleague didn’t want to Google something one evening “because he needed something to do tomorrow at work”.
I had a coworker who ended up in a similar situation. At one point they were almost literally being paid to do nothing. They eventually stopped even going in to the office all while collecting a pay check. As nice as that sounds, it was still not a great situation because they didn't know how long it would last and figured eventually, without warning, they'd be dropped. They ended up leaving on their own to actually do something and have a more stable job.
Wound up spending most of my (remote) work day occasionally checking my work laptop for emails, working on personal projects on my personal laptop and gardening or doing some DIY fixes on our old house.
Felt bad the entire time and finding a new job was a huge weight off my shoulders.