In the game you have the option to skip levels 1-3 by pressing Shift+L (not a cheat code) with the effect of having only 15 minutes left instead of 60 and starting at level 4. So I wonder why don´t you skip the first 3 levels in the any% run?

In glitchless it might not be possible (just guessing) to finish in 15 minutes, but with normal any% it should as the current WR is sub 15 and you save three or so minutes by skipping those levels. As I am not good enough at this game I never tried it, so I don´t know if you can actually pass all the remaining levels, so in case it is impossible my apologies.

It's still a cheat as it's the same button combination for skipping any level with "prince megahit".

But the difference is you don´t need to type in "prince megahit" which activates cheat codes. It comes as default.. and your time gets reduced to 15 minutes compared to the actual cheat which doesn´t affect it.

Just because you don't have to enter "prince megahit" doesn't mean it's not a cheat. Just my opinion.

Cheats and intended game features are not the same, why else would the developers bother to seperate it? If you want to play with cheats, you enable the codes by adding "megahit" or "improved" depending on your version. Skipping levels 1-3 with time penalty is clearly an indented game feature, otherwise it wouldn´t be available in the normal mode.

What does mods think about this?

I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with this option. The manual itself does acknowledge this option (see PDF page 9 of this http://www.abandonia.com/files/extras/26916_Extra%20document_Manual.pdf) and, while it explicitly states "it is not possible to win the game" with this mode they probably weren't expecting available glitches.

I'm out of practice so I haven't yet confirmed that the game completes without saves when using this command. If it does...ultimately this comes down to a decision of preference, and I prefer to side with the convention of segmented runs from 10+ years ago that ran every level. Might make sense to rename the category to All Levels? Either way there will be an explicit mention of this particular command so as to avoid confusion.