"Cheating" with hops is a dumb myth that needs to die. High hopping rates present a number of challenges that make this notion ridiculous. Shitty brewers make shitty hoppy beers just as much as they make shitty lagers, ambers, etc.
The real story is that hoppy beer sells. That's the whole story; there's no other reason why they are so prevalent. The end.
To make these beers, here's what you have to deal with:
* The Hop market! Congratulations new brewery, you're either paying 2 or 3 times as much for popular hop varieties, or else you're going without and can suck on some Cascade. Good luck negotiating a reasonable contract for next year buying in pitiful amounts. You get to subject yourself and your razor-thin margins to the spot market.
* Hop quality. Hops age and oxidize fairly easily, and variability year to year is substantial. If you want any kind of quality and consistency, it's a big job to closely monitor your key ingredient.
* Hopping technique. Bittering, flavor, aroma, Whirlpool, hopstands, dry hopping, double-dry hopping, each pose unique challenges and opportunities, and brewers fuck it up all. the. time. Good hopping requires careful attention to process, and depends greatly on your highly variable ingredients. Get it wrong and some common flavor descriptors are: cat-piss, vegetal, astringent, etc. Truly, there is a whole cornucopia of shitty IPAs.
* DO - dissolved oxygen. Oxygen destroys hoppy beer very easily. Your process better be perfect, or else you better be pushing that shit out within a week or two. Distribution is a fool's errand unless you're a big fish.
* Hop bite. Basically this comes down to filtration, which smaller operations may not do. Fairly easy to avoid, but so very, very common.
FWIW, weissbier is a lot easier to brew. Find a maltster that works for you, test a couple different yeasts and fermentation profiles, and you're done. Maltsters are fucking legends that make a terrifically consistent product (not the bougie 'indie' guys, the real legends). And yeast suppliers aren't far off.
Now, the Germans will faff off about decoctions and hot-side oxygen and all that, and they do make good beer, but you can make really solid beer without even thinking of all that. I will drink a fresh weissbier every time over getting something imported from Germany to the US. Most of the time, I'll pick it over what you get in the German supermarkets.