The judgement of the first hexagram is four Chinese characters: yuan heng li zhen. Almost everything that divides translations of the I Ching can be demonstrated on those four words.
The Ten Wings, the philosophical commentaries appended to the text centuries after its core was composed, read them as four qualities: sublimity, success, furthering and perseverance, four cardinal virtues of the creative principle. Richard Wilhelm's German version of 1924, and the Cary Baynes English translation of 1950 that carries it to most readers, follows that reading, and it is why the hexagram arrives in English as a statement about moral character.
Read as Bronze Age divination language, the same four words say something much flatter and more technical: a primary offering, and a favourable augury. Yuan is primary or great, heng is the sacrificial offering, li is advantageous, zhen is the act of divining itself. On this reading the judgement is not describing the creative power of heaven; it is recording that a large sacrifice was made and the crack in the bone read well. Richard Rutt's 1996 translation takes this line deliberately, stripping the commentarial layer away to show what the oldest stratum actually says.
Neither reading is a distortion. They are readings of different layers of a text that was assembled over centuries, and the honest position is that both are present in the book. What is not defensible is quoting the Wilhelm rendering as though it were what the Zhou diviners wrote.