To photography is "to write, draw, paint with light", and that's all. Not reproducing reality or any truth whatsoever. Choosing a point of view already is an interpretation.
We can do anything, even abstraction. Photomontage was an important part of the Surrealist and Dadaists movements.
The end justifies the means, anything between the take and the final picture is just part of a process.

Some photographers think their photographic act is just about the take, some others think all the work is done in the darkroom or in their software, and the rest is somewhere in between. Any way is justifiable.

A simple thing about reality of light and colors : physically, colors depends on the light spectrum.
When we are in a room with white walls lit by common electric lights that emit orange light due to a limited spectrum, the walls really are orange, not white, because of the light. They would be white only lit by a complete spectrum light like the sun light.
Our brain corrects this state to make us see white walls independently of the light quality. This correction is contextual, we can verify this by watching a picture of the same wall : the brain does not correct the color and we see the walls orange like they are in reality.
We apply white balance on our photos just to conform the pictures to our brain's own distorted interpretation of the reality, not to the physical reality.
In a way, our brain is already cheating to us with reality, so why can't we in any other way ?

Photoshop is benign; fundamentally just an artistic tool. Photoshop does not have the capacity to deceive or defraud; that's  a human specialty. As in most aspects of life, things created for good are hijacked by a few with less than honorable intentions.

How about using a spot meter and a tungsten white balance preset? is that cheating? Ive seen lots of daylight made look like night that way even with film...lets define cheat first

Cosinaphile uploaded a lot of stuff from the olympus 12mm f2 that looked bright even when they were at night, is that cheating? is black and white cheating? how bout color correction?