Playing people who take 10 seconds every move— whether an obvious “only move” or the most complicated situations… and that pick the move that stockfish makes almost all of the time… are cheating.
Yah, I know about slow play, too, and it's effective against me when I'm in the mode "Eh, I didn't really have time for this game, but one more!"
But -- if you're over 2000, surely you've encountered cheaters and understand the difference that I'm driving at.
It's rather blatant, and on Chess.com I almost always get an email a couple weeks later that they were removed for cheating and that I got rating points back, and when I look back on Lichess I often find them banned. I don't even bother reporting anymore.
If it's early enough in the game that I realize it, I can just get into a closed, very-slow-to-progress position and watch them clock flag. But that's still a waste of 10 minutes of my life.
The point is not that they take their time, the point is that they spend roughly the same fixed amount of time for difficult moves (coming up with seemingly brilliant ones now and then) as trivial ones (even in positions when there's physically only one legal move). This is one of the red flags implying somebody is cheating, and doesn't even understand the position on the board. Their pace is monotonous because the time they need for copying the move over to their engine and then the engine's response is more or less constant.
