If your parents said come home by 6:00 PM and instead of coming home you put a wire around the city to “make it your home” and stay out, you’re tricking your parents.

G-d is not your parents, and set and worded His rules with omniscience that your parents do not have.

Is character substitution a clever rule hack also?

No. As an extension of the rule about not taking his name in vain, and rules about preserving written instances of the name, observant Jews try not to refer to him explicitly. There's a bit of a dysphemism treadmill involved, but oh well.