Why tho? Cheating just takes away from the cheater's experience and doesn't affect anyone else. It's pretty much like any physical game. You can play (or cheat) it any way you like even though the game is designed to be played in a certain way.
Imagine not implementing blocking walls in Counter Strike, "just don't walk through walls, it would make the game less fun and why would you ruin the experience for yourself like that?".
This is a case where not hiding the word list was done because it was easier to implement Wordle this way. Engineering-wise, it's not elegant, it's a cop-out.
Client side dictionary isn’t a cop out at all. It’s a terrific solution for a single player game that helps keep the code base elegant.
Well, cheating is less important than in Counter Strike, but not entirely unimportant either. Playing Wordle has a social component.
I think this solution is neither elegant nor terrific. It's simply completely ignoring the problem and claiming that it doesn't matter anyway. I obviously disagree.
PS: when I was a kid, I learned programming on my C64 with BASIC. Like many kids, the first programs I wrote were "guess the thing" kind of games. Usually "guess the number", but occasionally "guess the word". Even back then I understood that hardcoding the word in the program listing was less than ideal, but I just didn't know how to do better. Let's say that 8-year old me would not have been positively impressed if told that Wordle had the "elegant" solution of storing the list of words in its source code.
It's just the default of "I decided not to tackle this problem because it's hard and not a priority for my design". This was also what I defaulted to with my C64 BASIC games when I was a kid, "I don't know how to hide this, so I won't".
...and it's trust model extends there too. It copies your "Achievements" into your paste buffer and you paste them to share. One could easily edit their results, but they'd be cheating themselves too. There's not need for technical restrictions on a player ruining their own satisfaction.
My wordle doesn't get worse from you cheating, but my game of CS sure would.
"I don't need to implement wall blocking, the player should just refrain from walking through walls". It's not elegant, it's lazy.
Single player games included cheatcodes hard-coded in them since forever. Those that didn't had "trainers" which fiddled with game memory with the same effect. Howver, invincibility and infinite ammo tend to ruin the game for most people.