As a manager and employee this has also been my experience. it was even raised that effectively no employee survives a PIP due to the deliberate treatment of compensation (such as bonuses, which are immediately zeroed out) in the mandatory manager training by people who had been managers for 12, 15 years, much to the chagrin of the presenter from HR.
In the company I work for now, we genuinely try and recover people and we don't call it a PIP. But that is the exception for my personal experience over 20 years.
How does it work at your company? IMO anything with deadlines and paperwork is a PIP in disguise (thus, hostile and relationship-poisoning). Much less than that can easily end up being little more than saying "do better," so I'm interested in how your company walks that narrow line.
We have a management structure that allows us to do both peer guidance and detailed project tracking which can help people avoid falling off the rails.
Our problem has never been a deliberately underperforming employee though - all of our issues to date have been people who start doing light slacking or who are too easily distracted/focus on the wrong things. Careful hiring and luck.
I have personally managed a serious problem employee who basically did not want to work and put a great deal of effort into actively avoiding work (writing long soliloquies in "documentation" instead of writing code or meaningful and appropriate docs); that was decidedly unpleasant and exacerbated by the (very large) company in question basically protecting certain classes of employees but refusing to add a resource. In the end it came down to me doing half of his job for him.
In the company I work for now, we genuinely try and recover people and we don't call it a PIP. But that is the exception for my personal experience over 20 years.