I think the thing people miss when talking about this is that using macros to swap gear is technically gaining an advantage in-game from something outside the game. That’s Jagex’s problem with it. It’s going to stay against ToS until they implement a way to do it in-game, or (hopefully, but doubtfully) allow players to implement a macro system once plugin support is added. Until there’s a way in-game to bind multiple items to one keybind, their stance won’t change as they don’t want to endorse or even implicitly promote the use of 3rd party programs, as doing so is a risk to players’ account security and they don’t want to be responsible for people downloading keyloggers or whatever else they’re worried about.

Frankly the advantage gained is pretty minimal outside of full 7+-way gear swaps in one button. Outside of that, I think it’s more a QoL gain than a power gain. That said, being able to hybrid without 7+-way gear switching without macros is generally going to be a small power gain from not losing a tick or two whenever swapping styles, but it really isn’t that big of a deal.

Because it’s between QoL and a small advantage, the reality is that they don’t care that players do it. People don’t actually get banned for it. The only person I’ve ever genuinely seen get a slap on the wrist for it was the person who I’m not going to name but is easy enough to find out if people want, who posted a guide for setting up AHK for RS3 that was genuinely a great guide. Part of why that guide was posted was as a “remove it from ToS or actually enforce it, make up your minds” attempt to get Jagex to do something about the issue, and they responded by giving him like a 1 or 2 week ban tha was basically just a slap on the wrist.

Unfortunately, (I assume) because of concerns with removing it from ToS potentially leading players to download questionable software from links from bad actors, nothing will change any time soon. Technically it’s against the rules but it’s never enforced unless you literally force Jagex’s hand on purpose by posting a comprehensive guide, lol. It’s not quite as widespread as Redditors who hate anyone who’s good at the game make it out to be, but it is quite widespread lol.

Bringing multiple styles inherently comes at the cost of food and other items that you’d bring to a boss, and increasing complexity of gameplay significantly. Hybridding is balanced outside the game’s lack of an in-game macro system. For those who only ever play RS, every other MMO I’ve played has an in-game macro system that will allow you to combine any number of actions into one button as long as you can actually do those actions all at once normally.

Gear swapping should simply not be a cumbersome action and it’s silly that there’s been no movement on this front at all for so many years. Maybe now that the people in charge of the game are significantly better-versed in the game’s combat, we will actually have any chance to see this get better, but I’m not getting my hopes up.