I don't think OP was defending their own earlier work or otherwise exempting it from their assertion that all obfuscated code should be considered malicious.
> it's only admissible for hiding machinery from the general public.
I had originally read this to imply that somehow it's OK for a casino to hide its machinery from the general public, but it's not OK for TikTok to hide its machinery from the general public, but maybe "machinery" here is intended much more narrowly, and OP thinks it applies neither to casinos nor TikTok.
I read it as the only "legitimate" point is to hide it from the general public. As people with more resources will be able to figure it out. If you view that as legitimate is up to each person to decide. Does the value of trying to hide it from the general public have real value or not. In general the answer might be no.
"General public" was really the wrong term. I meant people with the ability to decompile and use assets or portions of the code for their own games. This was in the early years of Bitcoin when fly-by-night casinos were sprouting up everywhere. Most of them were really badly coded - e.g. the slot machines looked like they'd been drawn by a six year old. Others looked like legitimate casinos, but were actually running cracked versions of white label software. Ours was the only in the space that had a large, professional, fully original codebase... that was what I meant by "machinery", not the machinery governing user interactions with the server (see my response above).
