That's the contradiction. And, to be clear, I think you're both wrong and incomplete.
It's partially a problem that how it's being documented is either really misleading or fundamentally incomplete. That may be because that's just not how Google imagined Kubernates was going to be used. If you need to understand the CPU scheduler to be able to use this option in the first place, then the documentation should explain that directly or by referring to more information elsewhere.
CPU requests still protect you from something using all the resources, because the weights correspond to your number vs all the other pods on that node, and the scheduler will not schedule pods so they exceed the total available resources.
So more accurately, requests prevent exceeding limits under contestion, and limits always do.