And sometimes we must seek alternative pathways to success, and recognize them as such. Data stopped trying to play to win and found success in playing to not lose. He rejected the stated objective in favor of his own goals, and in turn was rewarded with new perspectives and greater understanding.
Sometimes the stated objectives can confine us to narrow thinking and obscure other possibilities. One man's draw is sometimes another man's victory. It is all a matter of perspective.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew, great game which was sadly abandoned and left to rot, started you out with the Kobayashi Maru. My friends and I got in there, beamed out as many folks as we could without firing a shot on the Klingons, and then got the hell outta the neutral zone as soon as the Kobayashi Maru was destroyed.
Is that considered a loss? I'd say we saved a bunch of people and hopefully avoided a war. Best we could do given the circumstances. And that's how we manage life sometimes, as well. You can't win, but you manage as best you can given the circumstances and take the small victories wherever you find them.
That game option is the perfect Starfleet choice, but I think canon of the test was that once you got in close enough to try a rescue it ended up that the Maru was a ruse. Of course if you didn't do any rescue it would end up being a true ship, but that's the no-win part. The game allowing a partial rescue made it not a "test", but an actual reality with some chance. Which was Kirk's point...reality can hand you many more possibilities than a test ever can.
Yeah canon I believe is you can't get close enough to transport without violating the neutral zone. So it's a binary either or choice. You rescue and start a war or you watch those people die.
When I did that mission, they never specified the neutral zone was there, so I operated under the assumption we were in Federation space. When the birds of pray appeared, there was no option to hail (or they didn't respond), so I just beat them. And they attacked one at a time. Felt really cheesy, like they used Kobayashi Maru as a reference without actually replicating the test, because it also served as the tutorial.
Kobayashi Maru should have been the last mission, not the first. And it should be properly impossible.