I wouldn't say 100% of the time it is cheaters / cheating. 99% of the time in the way the word is being used in this conversation it would be used for cheating and it can be frustrating (I remember being about to win the flying upside down in a plane thing in GTA V just to suddenly die and then be inside a glass box for the rest of that mini-game / in world competition - still curious how that one is done and that's happened to me more than once - just most frustrating right then).

But I've also seen someone riding a boat with its own individual bit of water (like a wave at the front basically) on the land in GTA V (so they've clearly messed with the game in some way, and either "hacked it" or taken advantage of a bug in the game) and I even hopped in with them since they stopped and let me and they just seemed to be messing around and it didn't really affect other players negatively so I wouldn't really call that one cheating.