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How can you possibly know that these are rare incidents?
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Now you are getting contagioned with Norfleet's paranoia.
In my 3+ years of playing first DomI & now DomII I have only been burned once, and that was a 'map edit'. The cheating host was spotted & exposed easily.
I have joined many games in different servers since then with mostly unknown (at the time) opponents, and always met some excellent people. No cheating in them at all I believe.
I dispute also the idea that 'mild' cheating could become common: cheating in a MP games when no rewards are available always comes down to an ego issue: 'must win at all cost' for recognition or whatever, so it's never mild but rather tries to _fully_ guarantee victory, all the more the more opponents involved. Both the data KO offered re Norfleet's empire at turn 23 & my own experience confirm this.
The problem with this issue is IMO that Norfleet was such a dedicated player, involved in a dozen or more games at the same time...so it looks like many people might have been burned by him and a good deal of newbies at that, which is a sad first experience.
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As for the strategies, "madcastling" and "massive clamhoarding" strategies are still very efficient ones, if boring, norf was not the only one who used them successefully. Just like VQ was still overpowered before it was nerfed, regardless of the fact that Norf used her in all his games while cheating.
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From our discussions at the time I certainly recall that a bunch of us defended that 'economic building' & 'turtling' strategies were only viable in big maps & vs non agressive opponents, and that argument was never countered at the time, but rather we were told 'look, Doom horrors wished for at turn 30!! after empowering to As9, this proves you are wrong'...now we know how those Doom horrors were wished for.
It all comes down to investing scarce resources in either the short term or the long, and the answer to the question of what to do with someone that is putting all his eggs in the long term is always 'kill him before he gets his return on his investment'.