In the distant past I had a time when I thought it would be very clever to have a generic lookup table as well. This was in 1988 using XDB SQL on an 80286 server, running at 16MHz which was very fast for an 80286. Oracle, Ingres, DB2 and Sybase were all mainframe products then, and MS SQL Server hadn't been invented yet.

But that was before I had learnt (1) proper normalisation techniques and (2) the reasons for using referencial integrity and foreign key constraints. This generic style makes it more difficult to maintain referencial integrity.