I don’t think the standard of “don’t cheat on evaluations” is very arbitrary. I don’t even think people who cheat have a moral or ideological preference for cheating, it’s just something they do.
As the post author, I definitely agree that hacking in service of the objective is great! What’s counterproductive or dangerous is when the model starts hacking in service of subverting your evaluation criteria, rather than in an attempt to do a better job. We explain why these behaviors are an example of the latter in the post, and we’re really careful about the difference when conducting these evals.