Confused about Gifting to region locked countries

I've seen reddit threads where supposedly hundreds of people have been helped to get the game despite region lock by some gifting it to them.

Example: I am in Canada. They say they will use their Hong Kong account. Looks like it might be possible for them to gift it even with a warning about my region.

Steam Customer Service says it's not possible but the HK person showed me a screenshot of having gifted it to lots of people.

I researched on GLM and the AI said even if you receive it as a gift, you might not be able to redeem and actually use it.

The main red flag is having to PayPal the HK person first, although that is basically a necessary requirement since they have to put up the money first and theoretically I could just block them after receiving the gift.

I'm not sure who to believe because I'm not seeing any warning posts on the Discussion Threads about people who ask for help this way and got scammed.