You realize it only takes an active minority of people to ruin the fun for the masses at large? That's exactly how cheating works. If I'm playing on a 16v16 map in any random FPS, and there's a single hacker on the other team, that's ruining it for all of us. 16 people affected by just 1.
All it takes is for me to gps spoof and bot my way to a higher level than anyone in my city is realistically at, at this point, and I could take over just about every gym around, at any given time, from the comfort of my own home. Just one person can easily fuck it up for hundreds, so dismissing it as "hyperbolic" is a dangerous road to go down.
Well two reasons for me that's it's not exactly the same. Also I want to make clear I don't want to encourage botting or spoofing, but I "understand" why people would rely on it
On a FPS in a 16 v 16, if the game is good, a cheater is immediately noticed (if he uses an aimbot or wallhack for instance) because it completely goes against the balance of the game, it operates from "outside" the rules and the design.
That or yeah, if you have shitty design like pay to win weapons accessible through grind, it will also be noticeable (although you might question the balance of the game by the dev)
Now, Pokemon GO spoofing and botting, while cheating, doesn't really operate outside the rules of the game. Most of it affects your personal gain without any interaction with others. Even when trading comes in, you're still getting these pokemons from the servers or how the rules intend them to be.
Now the one aspect that is competitive in pokemon GO are the gyms. And right now, YES it does suck that botting exist so early in the game because early on you'll have people with high CP pokemons camping the gyms (even tho actually beating the gyms isn't as hard, and you should also look at the terrible balancing between pokemons like freaking Vaporeon).
But ultimately, you can also look at how terrible the system is for these gyms is. Because down the road, maybe 2-3 months from now, even regular players will start gating these arenas off all by themselves,
because that's how the game's designed. Maybe you yourself, with you regularily upgraded pokemon, will be ruining the fun of a newcomer because he just started and can't do shit because he hasn't grinded for the past 2 months, effectively being gated off a feature of the game until he reaches level 20 on his trainer or something. Hell, some might actually be happy to have botting options in the future because they don't want to grind for days just to be able to have a chance at gym battles
Niantic should take a look at these botters and try to reduce the problem because it will impede the future of their work, but Niantic should also take a big fucking look at how the game is designed in the first place