This is my first time looking at the rules for Spirit Trials on the speedrun website, and I'm genuinely shocked.

General Rules: "You may not manipulate the environment of the trial through actions taken before the timer starts, such as spawning enemies during the trial."

Luma Pools specific rules: "You may not take advantage of Bubbles spawning too early and/or with a random speed based on your previous attempt due to the bugs introduced in patch 3."

Wellspring trial specific rules: "You may not climb the right wall instead of following the path around the left."

Wellspring escape specific rules: "You may not manipulate the wooden log or wheel to despawn prior to the run. You may however avoid going into the wheel."

About Luma Pools, a simple and efficient method to generate nice bubbles has been discovered, so it no longer neccesary to limit the use of bubbles.

About Wellspring trial, a torch-dependent method to climb the right wall has recently been discovered, and in fact you can get a torch via debug-independent way. If it is faster to climb the right wall, why not? About Wellspring escape, the wooden log or wheel has little influence on the way you run, it can save some seconds if they disappeared.

Well, there are many excellent in-game records not in consistence of speedrun rules. Considering that the update amount and rate of speedrun is small and slow, it better follow the steps of in-game records-especially many in-game records are created by current most-competitive players, some in-game world record winners included.

It has always been the case in the Ori games and, to my knowledge, most other games, that any kind of manipulation of the game state prior to the start of the run is not allowed. I don't really see a good reason for allowing it, when all it would do is just make the grind significantly more annoying due to the need to set up the game state prior to every attempt.

Regarding the Wellspring Trial specific rule, the main reason it's not allowed is because even the game doesn't consider the runs that climb the right wall to be valid, and it hides those runs from the public in-game leaderboard.

I see two different subtopics mentioned:

Climbing the right wall in Wellspring is disallowed because it is disallowed by the game's anticheat system, specifically its invisible checkpoints you have to pass along the route (As an aside, you don't need any pre-trial manipulation involving torch, the route is possible with the normal abilities). The generalization of this rule also bans for example the glitched burrow in the Wastes trial to skip the final left arc and using Bash OOB in the Inkwater trial to go directly from above the Shrine to the finish. I do think trials with shortcuts could be interesting as well, but there's never been enough interest in them and it's a niche distinction which doesn't matter for many trials.

Everything else is a variant of manipulating state before the timer starts. As mentioned this is not trial specific, you mustn't manipulate the game before starting a full game run either. We only mention it explicitely in the trial rules because the in-game anticheat doesn't catch most of those manipulations, meaning you're forced to use them if you want to compete on the in-game leaderboards. I think it's worth noting that these src boards intentionally aren't a simple mirror of the in-game leaderboards. These board represent what the speedrun community would consider valid speedruns for those trials, rather than relying on the arbitrariness of what the in-game anticheat does and doesn't catch.

As an addendum, I think it's worth pointing out the sheer brokenness of this game. Starting a trial resets almost nothing properly, so allowing pre-trial manipulations would open many exploits beyond the ones mentioned here so far. To name just one example, you could perform an invulnerability glitch before starting any trial, which isn't caught by in-game anticheat. I haven't seen an in-game run exploit this - whether that's out of honor systems or a matter of ignorance, I do not know. Needless to say though, for our community boards we wouldn't want to rely on honor systems nor ignorance if avoidable.