If you want to get information, as a candidate, you have to get it by asking questions that leak information in side channels, because the direct answer is usually worthless.
Framing things in a positive light? Sure, but that doesn’t require lying.
I’ve also never once lied to a candidate as an interviewer, nor have I ever been asked to lie. More the opposite: when my employers have addressed this question at all over the years, it has always been to tell people to be truthful with candidates.
Even leaving aside the ethical question, it would be a bad move: if I deceive someone into joining my team, I’m the one who will have to suffer through a working relationship with someone who knows I lied to them from the first moment they met me.
Edit to add: I’ve definitely been lied to by recruiters. Just never by peers or managers.
Recruiters have lots of incentive to lie to you, and managers may have a hard time being straightforward about the bad parts of being on a team reporting to them (though this is less often due to outright lying to you).
But they are perfect advocates. More than any other interviewer, the recruiter wants you to get hired. They don't care how well you perform on the job, they just want their number to be one higher! So they can tell you what the Hiring Manager's pet peeves are, and help you craft your story so it appeals to them.
Thanks for reading!
The real problem is that some will lie to you and you don't know if your interviewer is one of those. So you do need to try to verify at least some of what was said.
* looking in public
* asking via friends of friends or acquaintances
* casually asking about in a different interview session
This could be stuff about development processes, current efforts, what processes are like, what issues they have and how they're working to remediate them.
You're not typically going to hear anyone say "this place is a trainwreck" on an interviewing committee, but you may be able to sense discordance or mismatching stories.