I don't think anyone is trying to cover that up. Many teams are responsible for boring and low-impact work, so they need to hire people who are easy to manage or the work won't get done.
I hire engineers to work on internal tools. It’s far from the most “glamorous” roles in the SWE world and a lot of great engineers would not want to be working with Salesforce or Oracle. However, it’s very important and strategic to our business.
I don’t reduce the qualifications when hiring though. I actually add another. They must be motivated by this type of work. I find people who care about efficiency of teams and are motivated by having a revenue impact more than being able to point to a widget on the main site and say “I did this”.
I’ve been quite successful at it for the last 7 or so years with slightly lower turnover than the rest of the org or industry averages.