Solve a dilemma for us(me and friends) about the legitnes of solo honor runs

So we had this heated argument among friends about me doing solo honor runs

now, before i go further, a huge disclaimer that i acknowledge this is a single player game -mostly- and how people play is no ones business and anyone can play the game however they want, so no judgment there

so take this `argument` if you call it so, with a grain of salt. its not like ground rules or anything. its a friendly banter being written in reddit. no rights or wrongs, just wondering what the community think about it.

ok about the topic. i completed this game with pretty much all possibilities and permutations with different builds and romances and endings and whatnot, then my journey begin with solo honor runs with mods(subclasses-races-random drop mods etc.. to spice things up cuz they change the gameplay a lot and add new flavor)

the thing is, some mods are stronger than what the vanilla game provides, such as the witcher or nightbringer class, or having the fade equipment mod or sets of fearun . but considering it is a solo honor run, it still is a challenge since a very minor mistake or misclick can end the whole run instantly, also those mods requires to actually check every corner of the map and kill every encounter to obtain loot. in vanilla run you can skip lot of fights with speeches or cheesing, but during these runs everything has to die. also lot of exploits doesnt work in these mods. if you use REL random loot mod and DD expanded mod, lot of mechanic changes, non of the chest blocking methods work, carrying people and teleporting to other side of the map doesnt work, gyrm has additional adamantine pull mechanic so you cant throw stuff from above, bosses have 2 actions and 2 bonus actions (ketheric can divine smite 4 times and have 10 proficiency so he doesnt miss even against 30 AC, the gith boss in act 2 which ambush you now can triple eldritch blast you 6 times, total 18 blasts. just imagine, so you either one shot her or your run ends, every gith can rally or second wind twice, even the archers have action surge which means they can attack you 6 times including offhand attack etc etc...), lot of enemies now have extra cc such as tashas laughter/hold person/sleep, even the skeletons next to withers so you cant give any of them line of sight at any point in the game. so actually things are way way more difficult and mostly cheese/exploit proof. you are not even allowed to skip stuff, or you cant get loot

so my friends claim its actually cheating and not legit. and my counter argument is that literally every solo honor run is technically cheating because its all about min maxing the every cheese/exploit possible out there to make it possible, like obtaining raphaels armor at act1(i mean, come on its not intentional to get very end game armor right at act1) or pushing all dwarves in underdark to chasm one by one and non of them caring about anything, or shooting inside the darkness and being able to spam gazillions of free auto attacks and being able to kill basically everything in the map without even getting in combat, or being able to carry enemies, then teleport, gather them up like sheeps and them blow all of them with couple barrels(it shouldnt be allowed to carry enemy and then teleport tbh) etc etc.. there are countless other weird mechanics that normally wouldnt be allowed that im to lazy to write all of them. you know what i mean

there are videos on youtube like ` level 1 solo honor run or 1 hp solo honor run` and stuff, if you have watched some of them, you would know what i mean. non of those gameplays are like `legit` legit, its an exploit/cheese fest. some of those stuff are too extreme even for `rule of cool`

lot of those stuff are already something that a dungeon master wouldnt allow anyway. larian is not a fun police so ofc they dont remove such unintentional mechanics but otherwise a solo honor run wouldnt really be possible anyway

so, if playing with mods is cheating, well all those solo honor runs are not any different either. in fact playing with mods are even harder since they block like of exploits and make the encounters way harder.

Who is right? me or my friends?