That's a fair point, but I don't consider that "cheating" any more than Hashlife [1] (which it's based on) is cheating. It's an ingenious trick that guarantees that what's displayed is exactly the same pattern as if all of the infinitely-many higher and lower levels had been simulated, in finite time. The rules of the cellular automaton are never broken, only elided.
In a metaphorical way, it reminds me of the "tying the knot" trick in pure functional languages like Haskell, to turn an infinite computation into a finite data structure.
In a metaphorical way, it reminds me of the "tying the knot" trick in pure functional languages like Haskell, to turn an infinite computation into a finite data structure.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife