'Never trust the client', an adage that modern game developers have apparently forgotten. The only thing one can ultimately trust is the server. Anything client-side, beyond keeping honest people honest, is doomed to failure.

Regular (ie, not kernel-level) anti-cheat is as far as it needs to go. Anything delving past that, such as into kernels, is dumb and an increasing level of security risk for the consumer.

Why care about the binaries when you can have AI write you a script for an ESP32 to scan a video camera and mimic hardware mouse inputs?

You can secure boot most distros these days. It's not new either. Depends on who it what their anchor is, and if it's more limited than just secure boot being active.

I've had similar experiences with this FPS game called krunker.io

Krunker.io is a browser based game, and it had a pretty bad cheating problem, and since it was a browser based gamr, the devs could never implement an anticheat that worked for long.

They implemented a deputization system, where certain respected members of the community would become "krunker police", and then you could call them from a lobby. They would then invisibly spectate, and record and ban cheaters. The system worked really well, actually. Cheaters were banned quickly, and the requirement collection of video evidence held those involved accountable.

But krunker players had another interesting way of handling cheaters. You see, krunker has really bad netcode, bad enough that you would have to lead hitscan weapons a variable amount depending on how much ping you had. Krunker was also a movement shooter, where you could slidehop and go really, really fasy. The combination meant that you could dodge the shots of cheaters. As I got better, I just stopped calling krunker police, and started beating them. One of my fondest memories was this one lobby full of good players, and when a cheater joined we stomped them below all of us on the ranking, taunting them all the way down. At the end, they tried to sell their cheats and we all laughed. "Why would I buy these cheats? I'm better than them". Eventually they ragequit. Good times.

But nooooo, nowadays modern game publishers need control over every part of the game. They demand control over the servers, refusing to let anybody host their own communities. They demand absolute control over the community, but refuse to actually moderate it and handle toxicity. And now, they're demanding control over the clients, forcing you to install rootkits on your computers so they can control those too.

While it is not realistic to eliminate all cheaters, what I will say is that cheaters can easily ruin a game, especially one that has lasting consequences such as, for example, Tarkov. Which I did end up stopping playing due to cheaters.

In addition, if you start seriously questioning whether you lost due to the other person's skill or their cheats after every engagement, then it erodes the game's foundation and things start falling apart. You can't do the process of analyzing what you did wrong or could do better, because you might have done the right thing and just lost due to a cheater. You can't be confident that you could have gotten good enough to win that engagement next time, because it might just be a cheater and be impossible. Strategy goes out the window because you cannot assume that the other person acted rationally in a non-cheaty context. It subverts the rules of the game that you agreed to. Like when you're playing chess and the other player keeps knocking over your queen with their finger. It simply stops being fun. The game turns into something else