"The steps are the steps". Great advice if the purpose of school is to train people for rote factory work (we have robots for that). Not such a great way to prepare future leaders or creative problem solvers.

The steps ought to be a bridge to understanding the arithmetic as an abstraction.

Teaching and requiring that a commutative operation be ordered doesn't seem like it is going to contribute to that.

I agree with you. The learning objective is stated as "I can use multiplication strategies to help me multilpy", but it's important that the question asks about a specific multiplication strategy, and marks the question as partially correct because the specific multiplication strategy desired is used only partially correctly.

The steps are either being taught incorrectly, or they are wrong. Very worrying!