How to enable Quake 3 Arena cheats from command line

I'm running Quake 3 Arena on Linux Mint 19 by means of the ioquake3 engine 1.36+u20180108~dfsg-2. I purchased the CD years ago and I am using the game data from that (using package game-data-packager).

What I'd like to achieve is to enable cheats in single player mode from the command line. I've tried appending +set sv_cheats 1 to the command starting Quake 3 to no avail. That method works with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but with Quake 3 I see the message Cheats are not enabled on this server whenever I attempt to turn on any given cheat code via the console (after starting Q3 this way).

It's been years since I did this last time, but I seem to recall that there was a method other than using spdevmap and devmap to get cheats to work without having to run a console command every single time prior to the actual cheat.

Trying on the console I can tell that the fact that sv_cheats is a readonly variable seems to be the underlying issue as the attempt leads to an error telling that it is readonly.

So how can I start Quake 3 Arena in a way that allows me (locally) to play it and have cheats available without having to explicitly enter a command prior to the command enabling a particular cheat?

NB: if there is a means to achieve this by starting a local server and right away connecting to that it would also be a perfectly acceptable answer.