I don’t understand the narrative of describing respec as a cheat feature. You are still stuck in point buy, you get the same access to classes and spells as leveling up normally, and you get the same choices of feats.
If respec were to be used by players to “cheat” by creating broken builds, certainly those players would be knowledgeable enough about the system that they wouldn’t need to use respec to achieve such builds.
Of note, for the novice player, there isn’t some magic broken build they can make that allows them to insta-beat each and every boss. This is something only a veteran would understand, and they wouldn’t need respec to do it.
On the other hand, for new or experimental players, respec is the furthest thing from a cheat feature: in the case of the former, it allows them to be saved from horrific build decisions; in the case of the latter, it allows test running build concepts, like a Kerbal Space Program for builds.
Describing respec as a “cheat” seems to be a projection of an idiosyncratic problem rather than an observation of a systemic one.
