But if said company doesn't care about the human-generated content quality in the first place (evidenced by the fact that they're willing to replace it with AI generation), how is that not also a "nasty trick" by your standard?
At the end of the day they just want to optimize search results. And the Overton window of acceptability currently allows "human generated SEO content" but not "AI generated SEO content". It's just an arbitrary rule.