I've encountered several posts in the past that explicitly ask for a hint for their stated problem. It's not uncommon for these questions to gather full solutions for their problem, sometimes in their first answer. Sometimes, the asker is quite emphatic, including the request in bold, or prominently in their title. Sometimes, it's less clear cut, where the request for a hint is less exclusive, and more an indication that they'll accept whatever help they can get.
On the end of that spectrum, there are the askers who have no context to add to their question, and hope that asking for a hint will get them help here, despite not meeting community standards. This is a separate issue, so let's ignore such cases, for the purpose of discussion. Others have raised this issue, here for example. Or better yet, here.
I want to know is, what does the meta community think about answering a question with a full solution, when a hint was requested. Is it an answer to the question? If not, should we be flagging these answers as "not an answer"? Should we be down-voting them? Deleting them? Or perhaps we simply leave a comment below the answer, asking the author to modify or delete their answer? Assume, for the purpose of discussion, that these answers are otherwise high quality.
Also consider, does it matter how emphatically the asker requests a hint? Perhaps we should take some of the more drastic measures from the previous paragraph only when the asker specifies they want only hints, but not in other cases.
There is a discussion from 6 years ago that pertains strongly to this one. Quid gives an answer that answers the core question here, but given it was made so long ago and received a total of 7 votes, it would be good to get a more definitive and current ruling.
Another relevant discussion from 8 years ago rules more convincingly that full solutions can be provided to older questions answered just with hints. Does this still apply to questions asking explicitly for hints?