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1) Scholar skill that allows -1 card, +1 star to Handle actions.
2) Card 50: Terrocokus: Handle action while on Terrocokus terrain: Swap a card in your hand with a card in the action deck.
3) Be on a terrain card with Terrocokus.
4) Have the advanced skill card Restful sleep somewhere in your deck. (Rest action: 0+ cost, 2 stars required: Take 5 cards from discard and shuffle into Action deck, then discard this.)
5) Have an empty discard pile

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Get Restful sleep in your hand using Card 50 ability. Costs nothing and always works due to Scholar skill.
Get the Raft in your hand, then build it. (Rest works automatically for 2 successes.)
Costs 5, 4 cards in discard.
Play Restful sleep, using Raft, 3 durability left. 4 cards go back into deck, Restful sleep in discard.
Get Remember in your hand using Card 50 ability.
Use Remember to get Restful sleep back into your hand.
Play any 4 cards you want (make items, gain XP, draw more card 50, etc.)
Play Restful sleep, using Raft, 2 durability left.
Repeat indefinitely. When Raft gets used up, just get it and build it again, then keep going. As long as the discard pile never includes Restful sleep and all 3 Remember cards, you can always keep this going.

I've played 2 games so far, and I got the Scholar + card 50 combo in game 1 (which is already quite powerful to search through the deck). Now in my second game I got that combo again, plus I just drew the Restful sleep advanced action, which makes things go infinite, as far as I can tell. I can get unlimited XP, draw all of the card 50s, and build every item in any order I want.

Note that I also got the Artisan advanced skill in game 2, so I don't even need to bother rebuilding the Raft - I can just use Artisan to ensure it never goes away, which is actually relevant since I have some non-action deck items merged with the Raft at the moment.

× in order to use the card 50 you mentioned, you need to swap a card in your hand with a card in the Discard Pile

×The active player may exchange 1 Skill card from their hand with the card of their choice from the Action Deck.

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It works because Dark Side puts the game in a state where there are no curses in the discard, which means you can draw as many cards as you want into your next check up to the whole deck + discard pile. It is impossible for sudden death to kill you if the curses are all in the deck.

The sequence:
Sleep, triggering Dark Side
5 curses in the deck, none in the discard.
Take a non-locked action, drawing the whole deck + discard pile. This could even be the same Sleep.
Get 50+ successes and choose any card in your deck to keep.
Your deck is empty. Everything is in the discard.
Dark Side
Repeat forever, getting 50+ successes on checks and finding any cards you want from the discard.

Unfortunately most of the action cards you'd really want to use, like Remember the Notes, are locked actions. You can still use Notes infinitely, but it is a more complicated sequence.

Dark Side
Take an action, draw the whole discard pile, keep a Serenity card.
Dark Side (the deck is nothing but curses now)
Take an action, draw the whole discard pile, keep Notes.
Dark Side (the deck is still just curses)
Play Notes, draw a curse, discard the serenity card to make it a success.
Dark Side
Repeat until you run out of 050s.

So you can build any set of items you want, get infinite XP and all the Notes and buy all the advanced skills. You do have to work around the fact that it leaves your action deck nothing but curses when you want to go back to playing the game, but that's also doable.

Get Infinite XP
Buy All Advanced Skills
Dark Side
Take a check, draw the whole discard pile, keep Fit.
Dark Side
Take a check, play Fit, draw the whole discard pile, keep whatever.
Shuffle 40+ cards into the deck, one for every seven in the discard pile.
(Optional) One last Dark Side to shuffle any remaining curses into the deck.

×one of the curses is mostly a big XP grind where you spend increasingly-large piles of XP to advance. You're supposed to get this XP from, like, wandering around, visiting the guardians, making little sacrifices, basically playing the game normally with a slight focus on XP gain. But, obviously, there are strategies to do it much faster which leave that curse with pretty much no gameplay.

You can sail back and forth from Turtle Island over and over, doing the blood sacrifice for 3XP per character, drop the bloody statuses when you sail away, and then come back (with either the raft or the stool) to do it again. with 4 people in the party for max efficiency you get 12 XP per trip. Trips barely cost you anything and you only need 4 or 5 to do the whole quest at that rate.

You can also ignore spending XP on the quest completely and just buy advanced skills. Once you have a dozen or so purchased, you can go to the Goddess and sell them all back for 5 (or 6) each (using Remember to get the ones in the discard and drawing extra cards on checks to get the ones from the deck) and just do the whole quest there. You've got to be a little careful not to accidentally kill yourself doing this (the XP grind is not the end of the quest) but only a little, and you can finish the quest by spending less XP (if you buy cheap skills) and without the penalty of having to sink XP into the quest instead of advanced skills.

The former strat turns that curse into a very short repetitive grind. The latter turns it into a pretty much objectiveless exploration run where you can do the whole quest pretty much whenever you feel like it at the Goddess. So, what's intended? What's cheating? What's fair? What should you do?

The obvious thought is that the curse is meant to be an endurance run and the fact that there are more efficient xp sources to exploit is mostly accidental, but I don't think that's necessarily true. I think perhaps the actual challenge of the curse is to evaluate the efficiency of the various XP sources and come up with a cheesy strategy to get a ton of XP.

Nobody would call either strategy cheating. Clearly you're allowed to take those actions, no rule prevents you from taking them repeatedly. If you are trying to beat the game quickly or efficiently, or even just trying to beat it at all for the first time, they are fair.

Should you use them? That's up to you. I think most people will have more fun with that curse if you use it as an excuse to explore instead of trying to set up and execute a loop, but everybody gets their own enjoyment out of games. It seems you're like me and you enjoy finding broken/cheesy strategies in games, and that's 100% a legitimate way to enjoy The Seventh Continent.

×In the room in the dungeon with the cages,

I support doing this. They gave you a button to unload events, it is fine to use it, I say. But a lot of people think you should only save if you plan on stopping your session.

×what's the name of the curse that deals with the XP grind?

×An Offering to the Guardians