There is an enormous difference between the people "consulting with colleagues" and the people openly cheating. When I was doing my engineering degree there were always groups of students who would go over assignments together, see if their answers matched up, and then look through the textbooks and course materials together to see which person was right. That's consulting.
There were also people who would pay someone else to do the assignments, and then upload PDFs of completed assignments to a private chat. World of difference.
Sure, but what the other person is describing as cheating sounds, to me at least, very much like the former case. There was a task, the students were allowed to work on the task in their own time, with their own resources, and chose to put their heads together rather than work on them individually. To me, that seems fairly reasonable.
That said, a lot of this stuff seems kind of culturally specific. At least for the two degrees that I experienced in the UK, there were roughly three types of graded work: exams (overseen, sit in silence, possibly with your own notes but generally not, fixed time limit around 1-2hrs); lab-work (usually done in the building although worked on outside of lab hours as well, fixed deadline of around a week or two, usually graded at least in part based on an oral conversation with the examiner); and coursework (take-home work, fixed deadline ranging from one week to a couple of months, allowed to discuss but direct copying is banned).
In these cases, it rarely makes sense to cheat by directly sharing answers. Obviously in an exam it would be useful, but the conditions of the exam make it largely prohibitively difficult. In coursework, it's usually obvious if people are handing copies of the same work in. And for lab work, the challenge was usually not to just complete the lab and get a "right" result, but rather to understand the task and be able to explain what was going on to the TA grading you. If you can cheat well enough to pass that, you probably understand what's going on - which is exactly the aim of the course anyway.
Whereas it feels like what people are talking about here is students being sent home with problem worksheets, being expected not to talk about them at all, and then getting grades based on those answers. That seems to me to be a system that practically encourages cheating - work together as a group, and you'll obviously be able to achieve more than any one individual, even if you could all pass the course in the first place. In contrast, we also had similar worksheets, but they were never graded, and we were usually encouraged to work together to figure out what was going on. We could then take our answers to tutorials and have a discussion about where we went wrong and why we went wrong usually in a group of any four or five.
So reading this article and some of the comments here, I'm really struggling to get an image of what these teachers are expecting from their students, if they're setting problems that are so obviously gameable.
There were also people who would pay someone else to do the assignments, and then upload PDFs of completed assignments to a private chat. World of difference.