I completely disagree with cheating in any kind of competitive environment, the article was only talking about casual play. I assumed these bots would be easily detected and banned in high level tournament play? Also a very, very large number of the league community disagrees with you on the timer issue. It's not a debate worth getting into, but that's kinda my point. Plenty of gameplay is relative, and people get very absolute about how games "should" be played.
I'm at work now, but I will respond best I can. What I'm saying is that cheating is noticeable by the fact that it is an unattainable advantage by normal means. Whether what you say is cheating is up to debate, but what I'm referring to is the more clean cut cheating which is what the article seemed to be pointing to especially the part where they go indepth about the closet cheaters masking their behavior. I don't think what you are referring to is the same cheating as I am referring to.
Yeah I think we are approaching it from different angles. I tend to view things from the more hacker side of things, and was trying to offer the perspective from the other side of the fence. In general, almost no one supports egregious cheating, myself included.