Recently, i had to move from nixos to windows against my will simpy because of anti cheats. While i dont game that much, the few games i enjoy playing are all online with some kind of anti cheat. I used to dual boot but i was tired of having to wait for my slow hdd to load windows (i only have one ssd). I literally used linux for everything else but because of anti cheats i am forced to move to windows. I managed to make it a little better by using wsl2 and removing bloatware but it will never be the same as linux
I play League of Legends via Proton. I assume it has an anti cheat and I never had issues with cheaters/hackers. I refuse to believe they need kernel level anti cheat for valorant. Not that I care about shooters.
If you refuse to believe it then my 10 years of making fast-paced shooters won’t change your mind. League uses a userland-level anti-cheat that is easily broken. This is why most of their hacking detection is server-side. Also, reaction time doesn’t really play a huge factor in League. So as long as it’s within human range, the cheaters can go undetected since Rio believes that using cheats to get you high human reactions “defeats the purpose of cheating.” as documented here: https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-anti-cheat-in-lol-more/
So overall, shooters are much faster and require client-side authority to feel good. In league, the game is slow enough to wait for the server to tell you what happened. In something like Overwatch, the clients report what happened. When you have that level of fidelity you need that level of trust. But you don’t care about shooters, so don’t worry about it. You can make your flawed argument that all games can be league and all anti-cheat systems can focus on league-like gameplay.