Yes. It is much in vogue. Especially in big corps. And Big corps have no idea what they doing. A year ago I had helped couple of managers to “go back to engineering”, because org had to many managers.
The amount of people who can make code and manage is very limited. But it is very alluring from the perspective of human resource optimization for people to do both. You take decent engineer => You receive shitty miserable manager that can code something non essential. This is very sad.
Big corps are like a pythons on ketanol. They have no idea what happening but they want to grow and shit profits everywhere.
Consider to take look on http://intive-fdv.github.io/DynamicJasper/ It is more code friendly Jasper wrapper to provide reports. Plain jasper is very XML heavy and you will end in wrapping it in some template engine at some point to reduce repetition. Otherwise download the Jasper Report studio crate simple reports and play around. There are maven and gradle build plugins that compile reports during the build and then you can work with compiled versions.
Jasper by itself is not a bad technology and work quite good for designing reports.