Funny that some startups by middle class people thought "hustle," meant energetic teamwork like on a kids sports team, whereas if you had any street smarts at all, hustle means getting leverage over someone by pre-empting their ability to reason accurately, often by bullying, nagging, feigning offence, and exploiting their agreeableness by making them think they "owe," you.
Preying on human goodness like reciprocity, empathy, fairness, and agreeableness is basically what a hustler and hustle tech does.
We are so eager to try and find a neat place for all our interactions. It never works like that. Pretty much everything ends up being relative.
Anywho, as far as definitions go "energetic teamwork" to me does not really qualify, because hustling in any commonly used sense is not at all required to be a team effort.
The point of hustle in the “kids sports team” context is that a team that “hustles” can beat an equally skilled team that doesn’t. In my experience this is also true of other kinds of teams and even in contests among individuals.
A sign-up wizard that splits up users' PII entry so they are invested in the process by the time it asks them for the valuable stuff is a good UX tech example.
Spam messages that pretend to be bills or from an authority are well into dishonest territory. The key difference seems to be in the honesty of the problematization. It's a continuum.
The best hustles play on the target's conceits, the worst on their virtues. 3-card monte plays on greed and a sense of superiority.
Business ones are basically blackmail like, "everyone thinks you're a smart problem solver who is easy to work with, if you want that to continue to be true, you will solve this problem for me, I'll let you know when you're finished." Less tech oriented, but the leverage pattern is similar.