I cheat their needs all the time, as well as cheating away a lot of the silly moods/buffs. The needs drop way too quickly to be considered realistic, as far as I'm concerned.
Nobody's "social need" drops that quickly in real life... I'm pretty sure most of us can go a handful of hours in a day without having to talk to someone else before we get to a point that we can't function anymore. Or having a sim get "tense" constantly to the point that they won't or can't do anything else. I find a lot of these moodlets to be irritatingly over-the-top dramatic more times than not (especially the "tense" one), so I use the UI Cheats mod to get rid of them as soon as they pop up.
I don't want to spend my entire gameplay time constantly having to refill my sims' needs or waiting for some silly 'drama queen' moods/buffs to finally go away. I want my sims to spend their time doing other things like painting a picture, or swimming, or fishing, or writing a book, or cooking a gourmet meal, or gardening, or tending to their bees/bugs, or going on a hike, or climbing a mountain, or training their pet, or reading to their children, or fulfilling their aspiration goals, etc etc and so on and so forth. You get the idea. ;)