I agree with you, but the rise of anti-cheat protection is correlated with the decline of community management of multiplayer titles. Most games now rely entirely on matchmaking playlists managed by a "live service" team, whereas it used to be that communities would run their own servers with their own rules and have admins around to kick/ban troublesome players, including cheaters.

A good netcode that does not trust the client already gets you most of the way. Games developed for consoles first trust the client to a large extent, so the PC ports are easy to write cheats for.

Remove gold farming and competitive sweatlord ladders from your game. Majority of cheats exist to make money, remove their income and they will leave.

When I played Quake 3 and other games on its engine twenty years ago, they didn't have any of that stuff, but people still aimbotted and wallhacked.

Some people just like to cheat for the sake of it.

iRacing installs an anti-cheating service which is not Denuvo.

It works fine as far as I know.

Reminder that Denuvo is not an anti-cheat, it's DRM.

Reminder not needed.

Many of these solutions, both DRM and anti-cheat, work using the principle of checking if the user is using the original unmodified files, and checking if the user is not also modifying the memory of the running program with some tool.

DRM has the additional goal of restricting who can use even those unmodified, genuine files, whereas anticheat does not.