Yes, this saddens me the most. I really loved one snippet of flavor text I read once where a tech priest is doing a sacred annual "chant of healing" on some piece of machinery, but the canny reader might notice it's actually the phonetic pronunciation of a command to activate its self-repair systems, and the "sacred balm" he applies is just engine lubricant, and so on and so on. Then when he's done with all the steps of the 'ritual', he sticks another purity seal to this enormous mound of them where countless priests, with equally little understanding of what they were actually doing, have performed the exact same 'ritual' for thousands of years - all to keep one ancient piece of equipment of unknown, maybe useless, function, turning over deep in the bowels of a grimy, rusted-out technological hellscape. It's compelling dark science fiction!

Now as you say, they're simply (much more marketable) wacky space inventors... truly, old good, new bad 😞