I could play and encounter the ocasional cheatet. great f... deal. to this day I still play wii mario kart with some friends and there is still some loser spamming bombs all over the maps because nintendo screwed up (I wouldn't mind games havin root access to a console). we simply couldn't care less. yeah everyone will lose to the loser and switch servers asap, but we still had a good time.
while on the PC every crap you install from steam (which already have root access, expose network ports for who knows what, etc) will also install with root access for what? so people can't cheat on solitaire2000 mmo? I gladly would like all that crap software to run securely in a sandbox and find the ocasional cheater that I will lose to and then proceed to ignore.
heck a blocking list would be better than every single anti cheat code.
I don't even know where I am going with this rant. giving up your entire computer to every crap game is dumb. period.
It would just plain suck. Nobody would have fun, not even the cheaters, when they are going to play against eachother.
The commenter's case was about removing or not allowing it at all, but de facto it's required.
I'm pretty sure non-matchmaked games don't have anticheat features -- it would be dumb, as it is an additional cost.
The commenter specifically complained about giving root access to games, which is a pretty insane idea, security-wise. If anticheating techniques really require root access, then people that care about competitive gaming should have an option to consider this trade-off and turn the anticheating pieces on if they think this has a better reward/risk ratio than not giving root access to a game. It definitely shouldn't be on by default and unconfigurable, though.
In CounterStrike (Global Offensive) this is already the case. The official Valve anticheat is not as intrusive as the anticheat provided by external services like Esea or Faceit. If you choose to use such service they basicly take your system apart. It turns out that in order to get good results this is needed.
I think you underestimate the impact massive cheating can have on a game. Even casual players will leave games that have cheaters in every other lobby.
Tho back then I missed their spin how they are supposedly only targeting "that one specific cracker", they must have come up with that a bit later because on their Reddit they mostly tried to argue "it's only affecting pirates".