No, they're not "trying" anything. They're exerting the minimum effort to say, "You don't matter enough to me to tell you the straight-up truth, so I'm going to engage in meaningless niceties that society has deemed 'polite' so I can convince myself that I'm a good, honest, helpful, and thoughtful person."

It just communicates to me that they don't give a fuck about me or my feelings.

Which, no one has to. I just wish people were more honest about it.

It's one of the most common causes of premature death and people are probably likely to get in to 3 or 4 minor prangs in their entire lifetime but it's still unlikely enough that you can straight up tell an inexperienced driver not to worry about it, as supervised learning drivers have contributed the least to the road toll in Australia.