It used to be normalized. It was called a sabbatical. The first company I ever worked for had mandated sabbaticals every 5 years. It was six weeks and you couldn't just add it to your vacation days, you had to take the six weeks all at once. Everybody felt fully refreshed after taking the six weeks off. Plus, their standard work week was 35 hours per week, 7 hours per day. Being a start up we did have periods during the year where we worked considerably longer, but those would be for 2-3 week periods a couple of times per year. This was back in the 1980's. Like I said, this definitely used to be part of our work culture.
Absolutely, the best thing I ever did. In Germany, the social democrats had a plan to pay people a large chunk of their salary for a year so that they can take a sabbatical after working a number of years (8 or 10, I'm not sure). Of course it was shelved quickly after they got elected and things went south with the Ukraine invasion and the economic downturn.
Had to google it again myself, they called it Grundeinkommensjahr (https://www.deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag/lars-klingbeil-gr...) and the pay was much less than I remembered; it's 1000 bucks per month plus social security. You get one month per year of work.