equating skipping 2nd plumes and/or skipping phase 2 with skipping aerial blast is... ridiculous.

she pops out far more plumes for 3rd plumes, so giving you 2nd plumes no matter what would be retarded if the HP check for astral flow was actually working as intended, as it would mean you get a break by burning her fast and end up dealing with less plumes, which means less damage to pillars and less damage taken for aerial blast.

for the same reason, forcing phase 2 after aerial blast makes no sense either since phase 3 (with 3 random mechanics) is longer and much, much harder. once again, this would give you a major break for burning her fast as it would shorten the amount of time you spend in phase 3.

two of the three HP checks in the fight are working as intended, to retain as much difficulty for the encounter as possible. the third HP check (astral flow) isn't working as intended, has been addressed by devs and yoshi, and is getting hotfixed so it will work correctly.

finishing a fight without knowledge of bugged mechanics can be chalked completely up to dev error. working around knowledge of bugged mechanics to change the desired outcome of the fight, however, is 100% exploiting. yes, the exploit exists due to developer error- but once they acknowledge the error and intent to fix it, by continuing to use strategy/mechanics to take advantage of this error is completely on the players.

and while they've said no one will be banned for it, it's pretty delusional to try to defend the exploit and/or convince yourself it's not.