Your logic seems to be completely confused - so let's take a practical example to try and help you to understand (although I get the feeling you're not interested in actually understanding this at all).

Let's look at CLTV and see how that works. The NOP code becomes OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY after the number of nodes supporting the soft-fork has got to the correct level (that is determined by the super-majority mining new block versions).

At this point a script that uses this previous NOP code now enforces a rule check to make sure that the nLocktime is greater than or equal to the value on the stack (if not then the result is zero).

This is a restriction not a relaxation (as it can now fail this test) - when any node that hasn't upgraded sees this in a block that has been mined then it will also accept the script as valid even though it didn't do the check and this prevents a fork (as it is indeed being treated as a NOP for such nodes and the value that was pushed onto the stack is the result which is non-zero).

If it was a hard-fork then existing (non-upgraded) nodes would not find blocks that included txs with such scripts to be valid - but as stated *this is not the case* (and again you need to understand the difference between relaying, mining and validating but again I'm sure you'll just refuse to admit that there is any difference and insist that it is all just validation).

If you want to keep on arguing about definitions without actually bothering to understand how the system works then I don't think that anyone here is going to keep on wasting their time trying to explain it to you.

Bitcoin isn't some sort of theoretical model but instead is a practical piece of software (so it doesn't actually care about what you think the behaviour of things should be according to what you think the terms should refer to).