Has a similar experience with upwork once where the contractor (who are screen recorded by upwork to make sure they're "working") would just spend large amounts

Has a similar experience with upwork once where the contractor (who are screen recorded by upwork to make sure they're "working") would just spend large amounts of time scrolling up and down on the IDE looking at source code - literally hours - to look busy and keep the meter rolling. If you can't measure output, there is no point in measuring input.