Being it not a meritorious way of getting merit, some people do take this path. There are likely quite a lot of scams related to this too, and if you get caught openly, your account (and the seller’s) could end-up being red-tagged at some point, with all that this entails. Really, it is not that difficult to simply create decent enough content to get 1 merit.

More likely than not, merited posts will kind of deserve it, but merit is subjective, and as such, diverse in criteria and not immune from abuse to some extent. It’s better to take a look at the norm, and not the exceptions, in order to get a grasp at the sort of posts that are merited around.