I think people are overblowing his investment in making it competitive

It's quite easy to cheat in Zwift as you can put any weight on your profile (and the metric for measuring speed is generally W/kg). As well as different trainers have different power measurement accuracy, etc

But to some degree Zwift and other 3rd party Zwift race-tracking platform find the cheaters based on outliers and other factors and remove them from the list

All he did is figure out a way to cheat which should be simple to detect by the platform itself (changing weight mid-ride -> ie make yourself lighter uphill and heavier downhill) and demonstrated it. And he got banned for it

The way I see it, it's the same as someone demonstrating an LLM prompt injection or a cheat in a video game. A geek hacking a thing they like and showcasing it