Abusing glitches/bugs have been a part of speedrunning since as long as speedrunning has existed. The rules regarding speedrunning individual games also completely depends on the community, and can quite literally have such reasoning as "just for fun", since really that is what speedrunning is about. So "it wasn't the developers intention" and "we fixed it in 227" (an unofficial and community patch for Unreal) doesn't really matter.

The speedrun community here for Unreal had very long discussions regarding the usage of the new death clip glitch, and was deemed allowed for a multitude of reasons that honestly I'm too lazy to go over every single thing about. Save hovering has also been a part of Unreal speedruns for well over a decade now, and calling it "cheating" is rather preposterous, when not only do the speedrun rules here allow it, but it's something that can be done in the base game without even changing any keybindings or controls. And take it from me, someone who used to hate save hovering and also called it "basically cheating" at one point. But really the speedrun rules, and what's classified as "cheating", are whatever the community decides, as stated before.

There are plenty of games that abuse save/load glitches, it's quite common in speedrunning. This is also why there are category separations for running the games utilizing different methods that can vastly change how a speedrun is done, so really I do not see any problem. Maybe a more clear rules description as you stated is warranted, but the rest of your argument holds no bearing imo. Also if I recall correctly, 227j/k have actually been banned from being used for speedruns, due to causing more issues than solving, such as the "engine speed fix" allowing high framerates, which inadvertently breaks water physics when holding your walk key. There are other reasons that go against vanilla gameplay comparing to the last official patch by Epic but I cannot remember them off the top of my head at the moment. Only 227i has been approved for runs, but again its sort of a moot point because it's still an unofficial community patch. Whatever versions of the game that are to be allowed for speedrunning is also something that is just entirely up to the speedrunning community here.

If a run is submitted as such, I'd be happy to add that category sure. Sorry for the delayed response.

a few so far and more on the way, I know myself, Sneeg, and Union have some runs that have yet to be submitted still.

Rules are still work in progress, and a new discord specifically for speedrunning RLCraft is currently being setup which will have more info. TBA

Yeah slight mistake, fixed now, still editing the rules as we discuss and go over everything so the rules aren't totally finalized yet!

yeah this literally JUST got approved haha, I'll work on setting it up soon!