I’ve never seen utilizing advancing tools as “cheating”, but I can understand why purists might scoff at it. You should always be running checks and making sure everything is legit before deployment anyway, so I have a hard time seeing it as anything but Autopilot+.
Pretty sure they just got bought out by T-Mobile, a company that has had multiple massive data breaches in the past year or so. It’s just cheap T-mobile 5g. I liked it when I had it, but wouldn’t go back.