I would say that it is less a 'white lie' and more an 'elephant in the room' amongst parties who are in the know that this behavior is staff sanctioned.
Whether this tacit encouragement is inadvertent due to negligence/incompetence or something more nefarious, I'm not in a position to say. There are no mechanics that exist in the game to detect or prevent unfair advantages that come from scripts/programs running outside the client. We may hear cries of 'not classic' from sanctimonious purist trolls, but that is quickly drowned out by the overwhelming number of deliberate, non-classic changes that we play with every day. 'Not classic' clearly doesn't mean much of anything.
So why do I say this play is sanctioned rather than just missed? GMs require, for many, if not all, infractions to be recorded by the aggrieved party. If an infraction is not recorded in some manner (screenshot, video, whatever) then no punishment is meted out, and the accused party gets away 'scot-free' so to speak. The players who pursue highly contested content are all aware of this. So much so, I would argue that we are a bit PTSD and most of us neurotically record every interaction in the game to ensure we aren't falling afoul of someone who is selfishly breaking the rules and banking on our not actively recording them.
When we look at things in the realm of automation and/or boxing via vpn or ip exemption, how exactly are the players who will be affected by such behaviors going to provide proof that this is occurring? Short answer, in 99% of cases, they can't. So those who feel no sense of 'fair play' or that 'fair play' is 'do whatever you want so long as nobody with authority catches you' are playing a completely different game than the rest of us who do not. Honestly. If you are clicking a pet track macro, trying to jump off a race line, or any number of extremely insecure/vulnerable competitive interactions in this 20 year old client, the unfortunate fact is you are a sucker. Less moral people are watching netflix, playing league of legends, browsing reddit, or any equally interesting pursuit and not staring at a wall for a 16 or 24 hour window slowly and funlessly accumulating wasted hours/days/months/years of their lives like a schmuck.
Ok, that was a lot of words that others may or may not agree with. Or not even read. Whatever. But let's work with a more specific example that happened somewhat recently. The ring 10 turn in that went from clickfest to a change of mechanics in game. Clearly we see something is significant enough to merit a non-classic change from the staff, but not significant enough to merit any sort of punishment? Have a look at the recording yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQl7yyJ0g4Q
This is a recording of Furoar playing Judan and winning ring 10. While actively talking. Not realizing that he won. Beating out 10 sweaty other nerds. While in a channel requiring comms be push-to-talk. While not hearing any buttons being mashed in the background to try to win the turn in during the time his voice was audible.
This recording is a one in a million, as the perspective for this requires being on the same team so the likelihood of self-incriminating is damn close to zero. Fortunately Venice is kinda dumb and didn't realize the extent of what he captured incriminating Furoar. So we get this video, which is, unless you have either never done one of these turn-ins or actively want to see the proliferation of this client-external scripting being utilized to gain an unfair advantage, very obviously dead to rights confirming exactly what I am talking about. The only thing more incriminating would be a screenshare of Furoar interacting with cheats.exe, but if that is the video staff is waiting for to pull the trigger on some kind of punishment, I think that only reinforced my point that this behavior is sanctioned rather than somehow falling through the cracks.
