PC Gaming

... why would you go out of your way to install a mod and then fight against what the mod does?

Like, sure, it'd be fairly nuts to make a variant of the game exe such that it basically uses a variant of the native save file format that is such an extensive rework that it builds some kind of literal self corruption mechanic into the save file itself...

... but it would not be that hard to tell the exe (provided, of course, you have succesfully decompiled it, or the relevant parts of it such that you launch mod.exe which sufficiently acts as a wrapper that then launches the actual game.exe within it, or can manipulate the vanilla game.exe/directory in realtime) to check the last update/file creation timestamp of the ironman save file itself, and check if it matches up with some kind of hash based off of that, where the decoding method/table for the hash is built into the exe itself... and then the exe deletes any save file that has been pasted into the directory manually when you run the exe, to start the game.

Kenshi doesn't have a particularly complex DRM or AC service you'd need to actively fight against... you would just need a legit copy of the game with a valid key. It is a single player game that doesn't even use online verification, its an old school cd key method.

I pointed to NVSE as an example because... it is similarly an exe that entirely replaces the vanilla game exe of Fallout New Vegas.

You could make a New Vegas mod that does this iron man thing trivially with NVSE, they already did the hard work of decompiling and reverse engineering the game exe, and then expanded its capabilities.

...

Imaging your entire drive would wipe out everything and reinstall the os from scratch, probably a new partition table too.

Restoring from a backup is again, fighting against a mod you have chosen to install becauae you wanted to use the mod.

Finally, the user, especially in Windows, absolutely does not have full control over the OS, unless you are literally hacking into it to defeat parts of it that it normally won't let you remove.

Go ahead and try to entirely remove Windows ability to verify its own liscense, or hell, even fully remove advertisements from your Start menu, and then tell me how the user has full control.

Kernel level anticheats have more access to your system than you as a user do.