You can call it an "exploit", or a "bug", or something else, but from the network's viewpoint those transactions followed the consensus rules, paid the fees, and miners are also incentivized to include them in their blocks because of that. You can have your opinion about what it is, but that's merely what it is. An Opinion. But if removing the "exploit/bug" gets community consensus through a soft/hard fork, then OK. Fork accepted.
Being part of the consensus rule doesn't mean something is not a bug or exploitable. Read my two examples again, they were also part of the consensus rules and yet they were bugs in the protocol that could have been exploited.