What you're calling "gamed" could actually be research and progress in general problem solving.
There is no reason to believe that technique would not work for any particular problem. After all, this problem was the best attempt the (very intelligent) challenge designers could come up with, as evidenced by putting $1m on the line.
In fairness, their approach is non-trivial. Simply asking GPT-4o to fantasize more examples wouldn't have worked very well. Instead, they have it fantasize inputs and programs, and then run the programs on the inputs to compute the outputs.
I think it's a great contribution (although I'm surprised they didn't try making an even bigger dataset -- perhaps they ran out of time or funding)