Where your friend's wrong is that the "intentionally feeding" punishment doesn't only cover intentionally feeding by running it down mid. And "unconventional" (or "off-meta" as some people like to incorrectly call it) doesn't cover every possible build or scenario.
There are three situations in particular where being unconventional is bending the rules (rule #4 on having fun but not at the expense of your allies being the rule in question) rather than breaking them:
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Building full tank or AD+AS on any champion. While it's not optimal, and many champions actually lack the abilities to do a tank's job even when building the defense, it's right to say that every champion can benefit from from defensive stats and every champion has AA's even if they don't have AD scaling.
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Choosing an unusual role for any champion, assuming that you neither: buy an income item that requires an ally be present instead of a starting item when you're in a solo role, nor do the opposite-- buy no income item when you're attempting to play an non-support in the Support role, which also comes with the stipulation that you not be stealing the farm from the ally who was assigned Bot Some people like to bring up an old Red comment that said minions don't "belong" to anyone, but that was explicitly in reference to the jungler taxing lanes. It is griefing if you're stealing farm because you don't like that you were assigned Support.
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Choosing an unusual champion for the jungle role in particular, since it has a slightly different stipulation than situation 2. You must buy a jungle item so that you aren't intentionally lowering your EXP gain, and you must not get continuously executed as a result of the base stats of your champion, because that is not an excuse. It sounds easy enough to just pick a champ not designed for jungle, but keep in mind the fact that Runes Reforged took away the ability to bring enough early added AS to clear camps effectively for a lot of actual junglers-- who since then have received slight starting AS buffs. Other champions who aren't designed to be in the jungle haven't received those buffs and many lack the early defense necessary to even clear two camps.
In particular, it does not cover intentionally building full AP when your champion has no AP scaling (or not enough to be considered hybrid). Many AD champions have what appear to be high AP scalings on their ultimate or one basic ability, not because they were designed to use AP as a main damage type, but because Trinity Force used to give some AP. So they wanted to give them a slight increase in those abilities when buying it without having them scale poorly with AD. This includes Ashe, as is your example. But also includes champions with no AP scaling at all like Riven or Quinn.
As for "intentional feeding", the problem isn't that people sometimes get punished for inting when they're not running it down, it's that the "intentional feeding" punishment is named incorrectly. Griefing falls under that category, too. It should really be renamed "trolling" so people get a better idea of what's included.