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I've only seen the phrase "quiet quitting" being used by employers complaining about the employees doing this when they, as said, just punch the card and do what is necessary. If there's some trend of employees using this phrase, it seems like it's a recuperation of an earlier employer jargon term.
Oh, of course the usual battle of who used it first, like with the woke, and if it is endonym or exonym. Whatever the case, the term was a global trend with Chinese lying flat or Great Resignation during pandemic when people left their work for pandemic relief and other issues. It was also a time of huge popularity if /r/antiwork subreddit.
But in the end I do agree with you, there is nothing new here. Since the time memorial, there were regular punch the card people, there were always passively aggressive and dissatisfied employees with some sort of vengeance against their employer and of course there were "go above and beyond" workaholic employees. There were always conflicts between these groups where quiet quitters despised workaholic udarniks for raising quotas of production for the rest of them and all of that. Which is kind of the point I wanted to convey to the OP - his Dilbert fantasy of how everybody hates their job is not something that is to be expected.
Just my experience, but I've found if you go "above and beyond", you're not going to be recognised or even thanked. Hey, you want to do extra free labour for me? Great, go right ahead, dummy!
So there's a point between "punch the clock, leave on the dot" and "be first in and last out doing unpaid work". Do what needs to be done, if more needs to be done then do it, but don't make a habit of working for nothing for extra, because nobody will thank you for the hours you turned up and put in unasked.
EDIT: As I said, I started working during 80s recession Ireland so that was perhaps a peculiarly bad time, but one piece of advice we used to get about jobseeking was "offer to work for nothing!" The idea was "employer gives you a chance, you demonstrate how good you are, employer is impressed and hires you on full time".
Need I say it didn't work out like that? One job in particular I remember, I was young and dumb enough to try this out. They were quite happy for me to work there two months dong the job for free, but the minute I asked about "so, any chance of paid employment?" it was "uh, no, sorry, you don't have the qualifications for this work, bye!" That, despite the fact that I had been doing that exact job with no complaints about "you're untrained, you're unqualified" up till then.
I suppose nowadays this goes under internships: be happy to work for the exposure and to get experience in the industry. Paid? For doing the work we'd have to hire someone to do? Don't be silly! (and again, as in the 80s, 'if you don't want this, there's plenty more waiting to take the offer').
I have seen this argument from people in real life and also on the internet and to be frank, there seems to be some misunderstanding regarding the employee-employer relation, especially lack of knowledge of being put in shoes of your direct manager. The main counterargument is this: what is the alterntive? Just doing your job?
I lead people and if there is a time for promotion discussion, what is supposed to be an argument for promotion?
Hell no. You can be promoted only if you show that you have skills worthy of that position, otherwise it creates a load of issues inside the team. I have had people with this kind of mercenary attitude inside my team and in my experience it is always one-sided. They ask for extra money for extra work, but they are often not prepared for salary cut if they are subpar for whatever reason - health, personal issues or maybe even because it was just calm month or anything like that. Of course there are mercenary positions like that such as sales, various contractors or workers in legal field who literally bill manhours or who have large variable part of their salary and who have to work for every single cent they can provably earn.
But this is not the case for regular positions such as IT admin or accountant etc. There are some unspoken rules: if you are accountant, it is implicitly understood, that there will be more work around quarterly earning reports or when taxes are due. If you are in IT, it is understood that you need to put more when a new system is being implemented or when some security crisis happens. This is compensated by less work on regular workday in summer let's say.
It is also common sense. A manager has other things to do than babysit everybody who bitches that he had to stay at work because customer call took 10 minutes longer after their shift ended and who asks for extra overtime and who bitches over that injustice for next week to everybody around him or some such - while of course not mentioning when the manager let him leave earlier to pick up his kid last week because his wife was stuck with something. It is just stupid busywork, I don't have time for such powergames. There should be some basic relationship that smooths over these kind of fluctuations without having constant excel sheet tally of who owes what to whom. It is also likely that such a person will show the same behavior toward his colleagues, not providing necessary support unless specially motivated. It is just not worth it.
In my experience, there is no such thing as promotions. The boomers in management remain there forever, and even the one time there was an opening they just gave one of the managers two hats to wears at once instead of promoting one of the grunts who had been with the company for years.
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What I'm saying is "work hard and get promoted" is not happening, because they don't want to promote you, because that would mean they have to pay you more. Get the work and responsibility without paying the salary is the goal.
I think there's a wide range of job experiences amongst the commenters here, and what kind of jobs you have/had and how you got them vary greatly. Middle-class kids of middle-class parents who always worked middle-class jobs are going to have different experience of "this is how you get a job, this is how you negotiate conditions", etc. from people whose experience, and the experience of their family, has always been "there's no 'negotiating', there's 'take it or leave it'".
Funnily enough, I was thinking about this in the context of a family member. Worked for someone who was the first millionaire in our area (and this was back when a million was Real Money). Started off with after-school job as a kid, worked there for years. Hard-working, responsible, reliable. Employer (and employer's family) depended on him for a lot. When employer eventually retired and sold off the business, my family member was made redundant. After years of "hey, guy, can you collect my daughter from the airport/drive me to the city/other tasks outside the job", what did he get? The bare legal minimum of statutory redundancy, which was not a whole heap, and not a penny extra. And they would have avoided paying even that if possible. Because they were miserly, miserable, pennypinchers who took advantage of his good nature and willingness to "go above and beyond".
So yeah: slack off, Gen Z, slack off!
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There's only one real argument, and in most parts of corporate culture, it's verboten to state it outright: "If you don't promote me, I can do better somewhere else, and this company will be better off paying me more than losing me." Nobody likes that argument (except salespeople, who will come right out and say it), so there's layers of corporate BS coming up with proxies for various reasons. For instance, corporations will often have a policy there's a certain number of promotion slots available, at which point the argument becomes "I'm better than all those other candidates for this slot". But the policy is generally more a guideline than a rule; slots will be left open if the company thinks it can get away with it, and slots will be pulled out of the air if needed to retain an employee.
This is true, but there are plenty of companies and managers who will make this one-sided as well, demanding you put in the extra time when it's needed but bitching if you show up late or leave early during the slow times.
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