This has been my experience as well.

I'm still not sure who is fake and who is sincere about this stuff.

We have a weekly status meeting with the first section dedicated to "how are we winning" -- which is like awesome if you are a baseball team but when you are rolling out incremental features to a modest app and dealing w routine operational concerns it's hard to get that excited about "nothing caught on fire this week" or "we did the thing we said we'd do".

And we have these horrible self and peer appraisals that we have to do where you are expected to describe routine competence in terms that should normally be reserved for a someone who rescued all the kittens and puppies from a pet store fire.