Two possible paths lead to their cheating code getting into a release. Either it was added by coding agent and no one looked at it, bad, but worse would be that a person was aware of it and approved - that's malicious.
Either way you don't want to be platforming the product because neither shows any degree of responsibility.
EDIT: removed a lament that people don’t read comments they respond to, in case this violates the site rules.
The defense was that it wasn't specifically tuned for clickbench, it was just an early incomplete build that happened to only support exactly and clickbench queries and nothing else...
Doesn't feel like much of a defense to me. At best it's benchmaxxing if not clear outright cheating
ClickBench tests a very narrow set of SQL: scans, aggregations, sorts, and filters. It ends up being a great starting point for building a query engine before layering in more functionality
According to both the ClickHouse founder who was levying the accusations and the pgrust creator, the submission worked for many other queries it just didn’t have full SQL support.