I think game companies could totally solve this problem a different way, but their incentives are not aligned to do so. Of course anti-cheat that backdoors a bunch of people's computers is good for the company. They get anticheat and a backdoor that could be valuable for selling data later, or preventing piracy too, or responding to subpoenas and being a hero that caught a terrorist. I dunno. Surveillance and control is popular for a reason. It's not because it's necessary for everything it's billed as necessary for. That's a sales pitch

Also, I guess you're not reading my post history very carefully when deciding it's a good ad hominem attack to use, because just this week I had a heated argument about some culture war shit and the nature of governments and ended up realizing I was being an asshole and making assumptions about someone, and apologized for it. I get that I'm pretty belligerent, especially on topics like how we live in an orwellian dystopia of surveillance and a majority of people in my trade seem to range from complicit to actively advocating for its necessity, but it really sounds like you're responding emotionally to my verbosity and tone and using this to try to discredit me instead of having anything substantive to say about the topic at hand. It is exactly an ad hominem attack, no more, no less

Here, I'm genuinely trying to understand your position and you are only using ad hominem and appeals to authority. My fundamental claim is that anticheat mechanisms for multiplayer games are possible without client-side control, wherever they are possible at all. So far, in opposing this claim, you have not given any justification whatsoever, opting instead to claim this is obvious and well-known and thus requires no justification. I made the only good faith argument either of us have made in this whole thread right at the beginning, the post you initially responded to, and you refuse to engage with it in any sense. Every reply you've made is argument to incredulity, ad hominem, or naked appeal to the authority of your supposed expertise, the consensus of the games industry, etc. I would love to engage in good faith with substantive arguments. You are doing neither.

"You think all the smart people in the games industry are wrong?" is just another appeal to authority. I don't think they're stupid, I think they have no incentive to value the privacy and autonomy of their userbase and look for other solutions