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Well, it's very literally co-incidence; things corresponding in both nature and time of occurrence. On one hand, cheating has been happening forever; we have cuneiform tablets from 1750 B.C. complaining that someone delivered the wrong grade of copper ingots. It has even been theorized that sapience is the evolutionary result of a runaway cheating arms race. So, like, you're definitely not noticing a new development in human behavior.
On the other hand, we could say the same thing about, like, transsexuals (an example I pick in part because of the advantage, arguably unfair, enjoyed by males participating in women's athletic competitions). Men living as women, and vice versa, are attested anciently, though it is hard to separate ancient record from ancient rumor. The fact that something has been happening forever isn't proof that it's not happening more now. And it is manifestly true that there are a lot more people claiming to be something they aren't today, than there used to be--to the point where some people get conspicuously upset when it gets phrased that way (notably, Simler and Hanson observe that the best way to persuade someone of a falsehood is to first persuade yourself!). Nevertheless, the act of sending social signals that deceive regarding one's sex appears to operate in the same mental realm as sending signals that deceive regarding one's fidelity to one's spouse, or the poker hand one is holding, or the like.
The trouble with your hypothesis is that even if you are noticing a genuine trend toward something like "increased social or personal acceptance of cheating," it's going to be difficult to measure empirically. You could try to capture it within some particular domain, but the very nature of cheating is such that your ability to measure it depends on your ability to detect it, and the whole point of this kind of behavior is to pass undetected. This is the standard difficulty with claiming that e.g. certain kinds of crimes are underreported, or that certain kinds of crimes are even occurring. You will also, per the example above, run into people who want to say cheating is not really cheating--to give another example, is extramarital sex "cheating" if it's consensual (i.e., open marriage)? Or is that just an extremely elaborate form of cheating (e.g. deceiving regarding the nature of one's love and affection, to the point of effectively gaslighting your spouse into believing it's okay)?
So I am open to the possibility that we live in an society that has become so "individualistic" in its priorities that individuals are more expected to pursue their own conscious aims than ever before, even at the expense of unlegislated cultural norms, and expected to allow others to pursue those conscious aims even when they appear, to our anciently-evolved cheat-detection software, to be cheating. In formal competitions we may still get upset about clear rule-breaking, if we catch people doing it, but I don't think I'd have to look very hard to find a Marxist willing to claim that "get yours, screw others" is very much a late-stage capitalism thing, or words to that effect.
But I think it's going to be very difficult to demonstrate, and extremely prone to being one of those arguments that strengthens your priors whatever those priors happen to be, e.g. "the real cheaters have been my outgroup all along!" That doesn't mean you're actually wrong--and the difficulty of the argument may make it one of those that turns out to be exceptionally fruitful when made well. But off the top of my head I can't think of a good way to explore broadly-defined "cheating" in a clear empirical way.
I think the reaction to these events demonstrates it's clearly not socially acceptable. Even under the highly individualistic, "WEIRD" morality (in Jonathan Haidt's terms) both cheating at a competition and cheating on your spouse are wrong.
If anything, I would suggest that these things are actually more likely to generate condemnation than in the past. Sports and other competitions have a long history of cheating scandals, from the Black Sox to Congressional baseball steroid use hearings to the early days of Magic: The Gathering when effectively the only rule was "if you got away with it, it wasn't cheating" to the 1904 Olympic marathon, one of the most bizarre competitions in sports history, in which the original winner was disqualified for cheating and the eventual winner should have been, given that he didn't complete the race under his own power.
The other kind of cheating was also quite common, at least among nobility and rulers. TBH, it's unclear if many civilizations even had the idea that monogamy applied to rulers, but even if it in theory was supposed to, for example after the Christianization of Europe, it doesn't seem to have impacted their ability to rule (well, social condemnation didn't matter; the practicalities of having many competing possible heirs is another story). For example, William IV of Great Britain had 10 illegitimate children in the early 1800s, and as far as I can tell, history is full of kings and emperors with mistresses, concubines, and lovers from the Andes to China to the Mediterranean. Probably the average person was subject to stricter monogamy norms.
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