Unless the game engine is doing its own scaling, this does sound like lying to the operating system to get out of the way of those pesky user-friendly features to get more frames.

I think Microsoft made it this hard to enable the DPI-aware setting exactly because it forces developers to think about things like DPI. If everyone follows this guide and ignores it, then I predict that in a few years this setting will be ignored as well and a new DPI-awareness API will be released.