The missions were real enough, even if only doing stuff in practical orbit (docking and undocking an' stuff). Problem is, the filming and photography is obviously faked, likely based on numerous simulations. Not so much a 'hoax', more a PR exercise: giving the public a tangible 'commemoration', if you like. When the next guys went up, there was little public interest due to the 'live' part being audio only. Having added it to the history books and encyclopaedic tomes as 'fact', with every school kid in America inculcated with it, the 'oh-oh' problem came because NASA didn't realise there'd be a near sixty-year gap up to today's date of any further sign of the marvellous folding Lunar Rover or photos taken without view finders and directly transmitted to Earth via a non -Geopositioned satellite (really? Look it up!)
and then transmitted by pointing a TV camera at the receiving monitor. Compare and contrast 1969 to 2026 in terms of technological advancement, and all we are doing now is sending crews on 'fly-bys'. As Hitler discovered, getting the public to believe a big lie is easy. As from NASA's POV, it'd be disastrous to come clean, so instead, we have a team of 'debunkers' and regular polls to measure how successfully the PR campaigns are working. NASA thinks it's enough to just say 700 boxes of one of the world's biggest historical events, which of course it would have guarded with its life, have 'gone missing'. Whoops! The FBI/CIA are not looking for suspects and the matter is closed.