This can also work the other way, you can be the person doing the unique difficult stuff that nobody else on the team can do and be not recognized.
Being recognized by management as contributing is more a social issue than anything else. I feel that you implicitly recognize this when you characterize work as "'cool' stuff that is seen as difficult" - the perception is more important than the work or productivity.
A modicum of time spent communicating what you have gotten done can pay dividends. A lesson I need to remember from time to time.
On that note, I had a year where besides doing (and finishing) a bunch of decent size projects that I thought my manager was going to highlight, I spent like a day or two optimizing some daily batch process. All I did in the end was change one line of code to enable batched inserts, which brought the finish time from later afternoon to early AM hours. Come yearly review time, one of the bullets high up on what the manager wrote was that particular speedup, which surprised me given it was done just in passing and I forgot all about it.
I guess you really never can tell what the other side is thinking. But at the same time, in hindsight this was predictable since it impacted a bunch of high-visibility reports and the manager probably got feedback from upstairs.
As a corporately smart man once told me: Your job is to make your manager happy.
This has more to do with making their life easier and giving them bragging rights, than it does with anything else. If you can make your manager look good in front of their manager, then good things will happen to you.
Being recognized by management as contributing is more a social issue than anything else. I feel that you implicitly recognize this when you characterize work as "'cool' stuff that is seen as difficult" - the perception is more important than the work or productivity.
A modicum of time spent communicating what you have gotten done can pay dividends. A lesson I need to remember from time to time.