Possibly. But, I don’t think that is actually the case.
But, I’ll just speak for myself. I despise the amount of cheating that goes on in the game. It made me so irritated in the past that I took a 3 month break from the game because I didn’t like the way guild collusion was being handled back then.
However, my time in GoW has shown me that you really aren’t going to get any traction when it comes to discussing cheating in any meaningful way on the forum. You can’t address specific people or guilds that are cheating because you’ll get smacked down from above for callouts. You can barely discuss the ethics of cheating because someone is waiting to be offended that you even mentioned that cheating is happening. Or, god help, you get people that come in just to state “who cares! This is just a match-3 game and not a sport”.
I mean look what happened in this thread when someone just suggested they do a cursory check of the top 5 players every week to make sure all is legit. There is post after post of miscommunication for a reasonable request.
Anyway, the devs always give the same response to these kinds of threads. We will never know exactly what they do proactively to deal with cheaters on the leaderboard. So for my sanity, I try not to focus on the cheating and just enjoy playing the game. I’ve long since considered all the “competitive” modes in GoW a joke.