Your 'exciting' job isn't very exciting, and I'm not taking a paycut to work on it

I see a lot of ads for projects that purport to be doing something new and exciting. When asked, it turns out the project is basically a webapp or mobile app that does some marginally interesting thing. Some examples: - We are letting people book hotel rooms on their phone! - Project is to send blood donation reminders to frequent donors. There's some hand-wavy notions of machine learning here. - Regular online retail, but everything is paid in monthly installments. Now, i dont mean to say these are bad jobs or bad projects. They might be very profitable. But they are not some fascinating topic that people will write a book about. This isnt the moon landing. This isn't even interesting enough for a made-for-tv-movie. Each one of these jobs wanted to wow me with the project, thinking I should just dream of them, and so I shouldn't worry about salary. And the thing is--its true that I would take a lower salary for a genuinely interesting job. But these are not interesting in that sense. They are react webapps with some business niche. Yes, if NASA said I could work on the mission to Titan or working on openai, things would be different. I might actually take a 50% pay cut. I know they want to sort of upsell the project. And I don't want to insult them. These are the aorts of projects I have worked on my entire career. If your project isnt going to get a patent, or potentially have a movie made a out of it--then you are going to have to pay market rate.