For me, I'm moderately ok with the whole task and "lying", though I'm in a "faint praise" culture where I can more or less express myself somewhat adequately through "polite faint praise".
The problem I struggle with is that I really have no idea if the "small talk" is going well or not. Just can't get a read on most people as to what they were hoping to achieve with the small talk and whether any of my actions were well received or came off as rude. So it's an anxiety minefield to start off any conversation where I often carry plenty of doubts into the rest of the conversation.
If people were more happily like "Actually I feel X because of Y ... but that's ok happy to get started with stuff now" then I'd be much better off most of the time.