At least they aren't literally in the business of making malware designed to own people's computers with the express purpose of denying them their computing freedom. That's ultimately what "cheating" is: an exercise in computer freedom. The game is running on my computer, of course I can modify it if I want. Any attempt to prevent me from doing so obviously requires that the computer not obey me anymore. The only thing that separates this crap from malware is some terms of service document nobody reads.
I've always been aware that all proprietary software is potential malware but I always gave these developers the benefit of the doubt until the actual vulnerabilities started surfacing.
I remember my very first comments on reddit years ago were on a news post about some flight simulator software exfiltrating your browser's saved username and passwords directly to the game company. Let me see if I can dig up that thread.
Edit: found it, here it is:
https://old.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/7yh4zu/deleted_b...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/flight-sim-labs-fights-piracy-by-...
> These idiots sent the passwords over HTTP to a machine running RDP on the public internet!! WTF, this stupidity has to be criminal!
Can't make this shit up.
There have been some companies that recently announced this kind of approach (at least with linux) but overall, we need our computer industry to be more open, we need more accountability of shady practices (exfiltrations!) and modern laws to allow people to protect themselves from these corporations that mean to steal our data.
I would distinguish between an Anti-Cheat actively doing shady stuff (like it seems to be the case here) and companies simply shipping crappy software - because that's too often the case in many areas.