In my opinion, cheating only occurs when you break a contract or agreement, sometimes these are unwritten or implied, with a living person. Sometimes that person is yourself.

If I told myself I was going to do a permadeath run, and then I kept going after my character died, then that would be cheating. I would have to have a discussion with myself about my reasons for doing so and my self would have to determine if those reasonswere strong enough to justify it. The only real consequence would be disappointing myself and maybe feeling like the rest of the run was tainted in some way. But that's entirely between me and myself.

I could, and did, have another conversation with myself though: Hey self, I just got to level 19 sneak for the third time now. Skill loss on death is dumb and I've thought so in every game I've ever played that included it. Corpse runs provide challenge and adventure, but this is just causing me to worry about numbers (which as pointed out above is immersion breaking). Shall we get rid of it? Heck yes.

In that second conversation, I haven't broken a contract or agreement with anyone. No, not the devs either. My only contract with them is that I paid money to download and install their game. As long as I don't do anything that interferes with their intellectual property, I can play it however I like.

As above, if your contract with yourself includes role play, then you should stick to it as much as possible. Not everyone emphasizes that element in their play. They might be speed runners or builders, which have their own entirely different sets of priorities. Are role players, speed runners and builders all playing different games? Yes, they are. It's great that this sandbox has room for all of those styles.

That's all for solo games though. On a server there will probably be house rules about what is and is not accepted. If there was a competition, there would be rules there too. The builders who put videos up on YouTube aren't technically required to put up a disclaimer, but it would be better if they did because they are implying certain things to their audience which may or may not be true. (You know what? Real life home remodeling shows are cheating too.)

So more or less, random people on the internet don't get to tell me which contracts I did or did not agree to. I am not in competition or cooperation with them and I haven't made any such agreements. I owe them nothing.

As far as recommending mods go, if someone tells me they want to drink coffee but find it too bitter, I'll tell them where to get cream and they can decide for themselves if they like it or not. You all act like I'm getting them hooked on drugs or something.