My youngest had a truly shitty 4th grade teacher. After the first teacher conference she proved to us how worthless she was. After several minutes of listening to her, interacting calmly, asking questions, and being generally polite, she was clearly backed into a corner with our discussion, walks over to a stack of papers, and boiled it down to: "I have 120 days to shove this much information (slaps hand on top of stack of papers) into every child in this room"
That told me all I needed to know about her general attitude and teaching style, which also led to my daughters misery in her class. The next day I visited the office and demanded that my daughter be transferred to another class/teacher. Thank goodness that was the first month and she was transferred the next day.
On a completely unrelated note, that original teach left teaching after that year and became a realtor
I say all that, to highlight the fact that many kids may seem to have a metric shit-ton of homework because of teachers who still have that big ass stack of info to shove into a kids head, but are unable to get most of it in during their time, so it's easy to send it home and call it "homework"