A Damaging Side Effect of Story Points

For a long time, Estimation is considered a top skill. Today most of us are told not to estimate our work in Hours or Time. The sad part is most of us believe in it.
This is because there is a notion in this new religion that Estimation of work should not be done in Time. Instead, the disciples of this new religion insist on using some kind of T-Shirts or some kind of cards or some Story Points for Estimation. 

Irrespective of what this religion says, the business still demands some time peg for the deliveries. All they want to know is... What is your approximate time peg for this work to get completed?
Now that is a fair question. Many experts also feel that it is a fair question.  And because it is a fair question, a convoluted conversion starts from Story Points to Time. But there is no standardized Story Point, and no two teams agree on what is "1" Story Point. Naturally, Story Point to Time is a rich land of confusion and never-ending debate.  All this could have been easily avoided if Estimation was not done in Story Points in the first place.

The baffling thing about this Story Points is, that it is not even mandatory. No framework says that it is mandatory to estimate using Story Points. And still, most of the “A”gile practitioners, treat Story Points as if it is the soul of being agile.

So much is the obsession for Story Points, that the fact is completely overlooked that even the person who is considered to be the inventor of Story Points, publicly said that he feels sorry for inventing Story Points. And still, Story Points are treated by most “A”gile practitioners as if it is part of the Constitution and their team's ability to ship better value faster depends on using Story points.

And this gives rise to the real damaging side effect of using Story Points for Estimation. (Maybe unintentional but still serious damage for the team). The damage is, Story Points usage sets a culture where a team starts celebrating The Effort, rather than The Outcomes. The race starts to burn more & more  Story Points in a Sprint, simply by gaming the Estimation. The ultimate manifestation of this gaming is, Sprint after Sprint 10% increase in Velocity. 

What can be a better example of gaming the numbers?