Yes, a different situation would have a different response.

The point is that your friend did all this effort to write those essays, which (supposedly, and I believe it) actually caused them to "learn" the material.

We are often changed in the process of doing thing, weather working out or thinking through concepts.

Your claim here is about like claiming you get the same workout regardless of if you drive a mile or ran a mile because you have changed positions using either method.

This is very different since the task was to do the creative work of writing an essay, which in this case wasn't done, so it's almost identical to the original cheating method with a little exception that you have to use human memory as a temporary buffer.

Don't see how it's legal (by the way, neither is the original method, the exam is legally about doing a task in the same conditions of having a set time as place)