I didn’t ever really bother about how well the station actually worked in B5, it and the larger human ships rotated because the humans didn’t have artificial gravity, and that was enough. It fitted in the world they had built. Similarly I never minded that the design of DS9 is non sensical in real terms, it fits with the other things we see in trek so it feels okay.
In contrast I bounced off Gravity because it was trying so hard to be accurate but had characters doing fairly long range orbital maneuvers by eye, and those two things didn’t feel like they fit.
Something like B5 isn’t centrally concerned with things like orbital mechanics, they aren’t the focus of its plots and the way ships behave is more a way to contrast the differing levels of tech. Gravity has a plot centered round how things orbit so when the plot cheats on that it’s jarring.
Likewise when B5 had an episode centered round a character who had been Jack the Ripper, but got the area of London where the murderer had been active completely wrong that felt jarring because the nature of that character felt so central to that episode.
I would humbly submit that Gravity was also not centrally concerned with the parts of orbital mechanics that would make it an utterly boring movie. I continue to fail to see the big distinction here, and why only one of these is described as "cheating."
In contrast I bounced off Gravity because it was trying so hard to be accurate but had characters doing fairly long range orbital maneuvers by eye, and those two things didn’t feel like they fit.