> I want to preface this with the fact that I’m not a gamer.

So you're prefacing it as someone who has never really dealt with the games you like to play getting totally infested with and nearly unplayable with so many cheaters in practically every lobby.

Its easy to think its something that's not needed if one never spends any time in the space.

Do they stop all cheats? No. Do they make the bar extensively higher to cheat? Absolutely. Even they point this out: "A DMA cheat is a separate FPGA card that sits in a PCIe slot and reads the game’s memory directly over the bus, while a second computer processes what it sees and feeds back aim and wallhacks..." Any random person can go run some executable they found on a forum, what percentage of the playerbase has these FPGA cards and a second computer to properly run these cheats? And even then, more modern systems can even detect these kinds of things.

Are there lots of problems with these anti-cheat platforms? Sure. Are they now often developed with ties to countries many wouldn't want have that deep of access to their computers? Sure. Is kernel-level anti-cheat overall as a concept overreach? Probably not for what a lot of players actively want. Players want systems to ensure everyone is playing on a somewhat equal playing field. Other than the games being rendered in the cloud I don't know any other real way to begin to enforce it.

> I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater

What if it wasn't "the occasional cheater" and instead was "nearly every match of every game you like to play"?