No, Roon doesn’t perform any pointing or redirection. When you play a track, a TIDAL track id is sent to the TIDAL servers and you get what they give you.
I think that “lying” is way too strong. The MQA has – clearly – not been fully removed. I’m speculating, but would suggest that a missive came down from the top (with a deadline) and, from an engineering / catalog management standpoint, it wasn’t quite so easy. The simplest thing to do, in TIDAL’s apps, was for them to turn off MQA decoding and continue to work on the more difficult removals in the background.
I say “difficult”, because most of the 16/44 MQA was encoded from CD masters and there are no direct HiRes FLAC counterparts.
As @mike said, we’re working with TIDAL to confirm what’s going to happen with this 16/44 MQA content.