Every once in a blue moon I'll meet someone who can trace the genesis of their career to neopets. I learned to code from neopets. It started from html, then I fell into a cheats crowd, where I learned Visual Basic (some of the best early cheats were in Visual Basic).
Then one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6 programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage multiple processes.
I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on to other games.
this is how i got my start in programming, eventually leading to working in finance and now in gamedev for a AAA. many of the programmers i worked with as a teenager to build neopets automations are in similar places. i have so many stories and even met my ex wife of ten years through the community!
oh and i regret all the duping glitches i found and exposed and stuff im sorry
Even if it's just indirect competition, by giving yourself an advantage compared to others you affect what others percieve as a healthy benchmark for performance.
"Just neopets" isn't an excuse, you could say the same for any online game.
Cheaters even wreck just the scoreboards for some games. You might think a fake score submissions is about the least damaging thing since it doesn't directly effect others gameplay at all, but it still ruins the experience and affects the community's ability to compare and share genuine runs.
Being banned eventually is hardly a punishment, doubly so if they ever sold-on their ill-gotten gains for real money.
There wasn't a hint of contrition in OP's post, and the downvotes I'm receiving suggests that the culture of entitlement is so great now that cheating in multiplayer isn't even seen as bad anymore.