Saying "Well the player can choose to ignore it" is not good design philosophy.
I agree, but whom do you mean? The cheating player, or the [can't say normal]... the ones not cheating?
FO3 and New Vegas have the mod tools free to all; so does Shadowrun, so does Grimrock; so do a lot of others. If a player wants to cheat the game, there is no stopping them; if tried, the solutions affect everyone equally, even those who just want to play the game as designed... even those people might have a reason to alter the game. Nanny-ware is as bad as DRM.
I was once asked for a mod to replace the spiders in Grimrock. Others have asked for mods to remove/alter/or obscure the Cazadores in New Vegas, due to phobia.
The original Eye Of The Beholder D&D game just let you choose your PC's stats (so that players could import their paper D&D characters). Sure, players could cheat (themselves) and start the game with all stats set to 18 for all characters, but (I assume) most just rolled the dice.
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A very bad example of this design mentality is a re-spec option. Developers include it because either they like it, or they want to avoid hassles from players, or they truly believe it's a valuable feature for player quality-of-life.... But respec can introduce logical paradox to the narrative; when characters succeed by abilities that they later never knew in the first place; or had inexplicably failed where they should have easily succeeded... because suddenly they were always an expert.
It's worse, because the developer then designs all of the game's encounters with the assumption of re-speced characters. That affects everyone. That means that no commitments matter, because there are no commitments.
