Way back in the day before ProTools and most other DAWs existed, the singer in my band was married to an engineer that worked for a small company called Metalithic Systems.
They were working on a very early DAW called Digital Audio with Wings. It supported (I think) 128 simultaneous playback tracks while the best available at the time was 8.
They were waiting on Windows 95 to be released as it contained the critical audio driver required for their software. I think this was DirectX.
Our band was a guinea pig artist for them and we would go into their offices on the weekend and track to a computer (it was pretty much all tape back then).
The engineer was also a very talented musician with very good ears.
We recorded in a very different way. He would have us play each unique section until it was right, then we would move onto the next section.
We never tried a complete take of any song. We'd go home and when we came back, he would have "assembled" the parts into complete songs and arrangements.
On one particular song, the bass was very prevalent (I wrote the song starting from the bass line) and our bassist just couldn't nail the correct timing after many attempts.
We decided to come back to it next time.
When next we got together, it was perfect. The engineer had sampled the bass into his keyboard and then "played" the parts back in time
It was during this time of learning about DAWs and digital recording that I first had the same kind of thoughts about "cheating".
But if you were to listen to the songs we recorded then, you'd have NO idea they were done this way.
As others have said, it's about the art form...
And the flip side is you'll see which bands are really cheating when it comes to the live performance! My bands could always perform our songs well!