Wireless (and generally electronic) shifters are likely heavier on account of the battery. In theory they require less maintenance as they don’t have the breakage-prone cables. Shifts are quicker and require less force to activate, and also more precise because they don’t depend on the finicky adjustment screws. And they enable tricks like automatically shifting the front chainring to march your choice in the rear cassette (don’t pair the small front chainring with a small rear speed!), automatically choosing preset combinations, and so on.
A small SDR setup can be made for just a few dollars and requires very little knowledge - as it has for the past 20 years... and works on many common devices, garages, cars, electrical and medical equipment and so on.
Making an article every time someone tries this on another device is always a bit funny.
This is gear shifter hack also not going to be an issue. If you wanted to ruing your rivals, you'll just pass them a bottle with trace amounts of growth hormones and their career is over. That doesn't happen, again showing that illegally cheating to destroy your opponents is super rare in cycling.
In the end its much easier to get a helper to crash out your rival than sitting ready hack him in the final sprint and hoping its just down to him and your own rider. Or just hack the whole sprint field and hope it wont get investigated I guess.
If that's actually true, cycling has a long way to go to align its reputation with respect to cheating with the reality. My view as an outsider to cycling is much closer to "cheating is absolutely rampant" than "cheating is super rare".
the kind of cheating that involves doping is rampant, because along with running, cycling is one of the sport where technique is the most dwarfed by pure physical abilities
