Could you be more specific about the pressure you felt to 'suck up' and 'lie'? I read this kind of thing often, but it's usually left quite vague. What exactly are people lying about?

Physics (since it's supposed to be rigorous) seems like a less likely area than some to be driven by politics and trends, but I suppose I can imagine that competing research programmes and ideas benefit from a certain amount of marketing and smooth-talking of people with funding rather than relying purely on empirical evidence for their claims.

Physics absolutely is dominated by politics and trends. I was constantly expected to over exaggerate the impacts of my work and its possible applications, on both science in general and wider technology. For example, we used to always say that it had some impact in quantum computing even if it was a total lie, because that makes it way easier to get funding

Physics may be in some sense more falsifiable, but it is absolutely subject to politics and social norms, both in how it lies about itself for money, and literally in which theories are chosen (since we can rarely empirically distinguish between them)

Right. That's a shame, but it seems like that's just life. The idea that it helps to constantly emphasise (or, as you say, exaggerate) the importance of your work if you want to have a career is certainly not restricted to academia. It seems to apply to most industry engineering jobs too — from what I've heard. I guess in that context funding isn't the issue, but being promoted (and, conversely, not being sacked) certainly is.

Well in most engineering there is a market and going out into the market and selling is not the job of the engineers

Academia is rare for having the engineer also be the salesman

My wife is the lead mechanical engineer at a small company and she definitely doesn’t have to go around convincing customers they need her products