I think maybe you should re-read my posts too, because it seems you misunderstood what I wrote. "Surely discussing the motivations of those who act deceitfully is not itself deceit." suggests that you are arguing about a totally different thing to me. I've never once suggested that it's deceitful to discuss their motivations, I was arguing that the actions caused by those motivations are deceitful.

To be clear, I understand their motivations - essentially "I want this job whether I'm qualified for it or not", but lying about their experience is never acceptable IMHO.

Going further, to me it's not clear which specific post you mean by GP here, as this is now many levels deep and my argument hasn't changed since the my first post on this topic and the argument I've been responding to hasn't changed. Do you mean the GP of that or the GP of the post you replied to? I'll quote them both.

The GP of my original reply was: "Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?" which was answered by somebody justifying that behaviour.

The GP of your reply was: "You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted."

The view expressed by both of these, and that I am fundamentally in disagreement with, is that the companies are asking for the impossible and so it is acceptable to lie to get the job.

The problem with this view is that it's the candidate who's making this assessment. They have no idea if there are any suitable candidates, only that they are not suitable and they aren't prepared to accept that perhaps there is someone more qualified than themselves who is suitable.

Perhaps such a person who's more qualified wouldn't want to work in this job. Perhaps the company's requirements are in fact unrealistically high and they don't get any applicants. None of this is the candidate's concern. What is their concern is that they are not qualified for the role, and so should not be applying. Perhaps they think they're close to the requirements, and apply anyway with a letter such as "my skills aren't an exact match, but maybe you would consider me anyway".

If the company's requirements turn out to be unrealistic, they will realise that soon enough, and decide what alternatives they have. It might be that they re-advertise the role with requirements that the potential candidate now meets, in which case they can and should apply at that point.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the motivations are, the issue just boils down to "is it acceptable to lie so you can the outcome you want while negatively impacting the other party?" I'd argue no.