If you change the name to "lite" the jig is up and everyone knows it's a poorer quality product than what they're used to buying. By keeping the same name they can increase margins by duping unsuspecting buyers into buying a poorer quality product.
Either way yeah this was an attempt at a cash grab. Which was quite stupid, because there's no way they'd be able to hide the fact that it's SMR for long, the performance characteristics is just too different.
But it's also totally unnecessary, because SMR is perfectly fine for use-cases with sparse random write workloads. Something most casual home users or small businesses with a 1 or 2 disk Synology or similar has.