I disagree. As someone who plays online shooters only casually once or twice a week, nothing sucks more than having a full session in Apex ruined by an obvious cheater. The fact that I don't spend 8 hours a day doing this makes it far worse for me, the time for gaming is very limited when you have a small child and having it ruined because of some script kiddies is incredibly demoralizing.

Let me put it this way - I'd much rather play an online shooter with a hardcore kernel level anticheat than a one without it.

A kernel anti-cheat isn't going to fix that, by far the best servers are community moderated and usually cheats aren't really complicated.

Yes, but as many other people have said - no technical solution will elminiate all cheaters, but aggressive anti cheat does make a positive difference to the experience. It can make a difference between running into cheaters in 1 out of 10 games vs running into cheaters every single game.

And yes, community moderation is great, except that it has mostly gone away in most games.

I doubt that there's anything a kernel-level anti cheat will catch that a normal won't (if we're not talking about very sophisticated cheats we see in pro competitions of course). I'd happy to be proven wrong but those companies don't even release statistics on the efficiency.

The problem is that community servers are a thing of the past for most games.

You used to be able to vote-kick the obvious cheater, not sure why that is not an option anymore, these days.

Abuse usually...

Yep, people just spamming cheater reports on someone who killed them, it's worthless without human verification and that's expensive/difficult.

It's already human verified if you require say >50% players to vote, assuming the cheater is not running a Sybil attack too.

Yea but you:

a) can't allow "vote to kick" from the opposing team in a competitive environment. That has obvious abuse written all over it, either intentionally or unintentionally (opposing team is losing or opposing player is legit good but they think he is cheating) b) when you allow vote kicking of "same team only", like CSGO, there is a lot of grief type of harassing where parties of players (like a 3 queue) can vote kick teammates just for general griefing reasons, intentionally deranking, and the like.

Why not let the players decide if they want to play on the 'serious' server with serious anti-cheat or on 'fun' server with minimal checks.