Sure, you don't get to easily make any changes you wish, but even this has real upsides.

Modern consoles are able to offer a multiplayer experience free of the cheating that plagues many PC games. That's because they're bolted-down and deny users the freedom the modify the software. To the customer, that has real value.

> To the customer, that has real value.

And it doesn't offer me any value if I do wish to cheat

I do not understand your argument. Today there are still competitions of gameboy games (and many other consoles) that have been emulated to death, where all the glitches and cheats are well-known, and there are hundreds of "mods". You can still participate in the "no-cheat" category, which is one of the most popular.

The fact that people can cheat, does not force you to cheat when playing. This is exactly the same thing in sports.

I was talking about online multiplayer against (untrusted) strangers. I should have been clearer about the online aspect.

In online PC gaming, cheating is a real problem, as people are able to modify the game to their advantage. This is next to impossible on modern consoles, and cheating is much less of a problem there.

I don't begrudge anyone who wants to opt-in to a designated cheat-based multiplayer session, of course, but it can be a real problem for 'ordinary' gamers.

That is a problem with the games and with the industry, not with the PC as a platform. Heck, if the console companies had invested in properly secure cheat-preventing solutions (i.e. better network protocols that don't leak info, cheat detection by packet analysis, better replay analysis and banning tools for server admins, decentralized trust/authentication systems, etc) then likely those could have been deployed on other platforms. It seems that nobody has been investing any money in that though, everything has instead been invested in making sure that the hardware is a walled garden. This approach might work temporarily for the individual manufacturer of a single console until it gets cracked and they have to manufacture a new one. But as you can see, it doesn't scale past that.