[squigz]

Based on a quick skim of the article, I don't think this was, for example, Twitch Chat picking moves, which might enable the social aspect you're referring to - although I'd like to point out the difficulty inherent to being in a room with many thousands of people, all spamming chess moves, and trying to find the one engine move :P

[somenameforme]

It was a correspondence event, played a move a day time control on chess.com. Chat would've probably been mostly on X and other such places.

[squigz]

In that case, I definitely don't believe a majority of people interested in this sort of thing would be intentionally setting out to cheat.

[somenameforme]

It's not that. It's that once you know the best move you start to see why. And then it becomes hard to get it out of your mind. It's the reason I don't recommend computer assisted game analysis, unless you just want a quick blunder check.

A very non-zero chunk of people also probably would not have even understood that that's cheating if it wasn't really clearly laid out in the interface somewhere. For instance computer assistance in the largest correspondence chess league is legal.