It's just a game. So what if there's cheating? Ban them if they get caught
I think kernel-level anti-cheat is a security nightmare, but denying there’s a genuine economic motive here seems naïve.
Company runs entire ecosystem, how apart from hacking their DBs you can ever get back?
If apex legends released a real dedicated server tomorrow, within a month there would be a large selection of well moderated community servers and cheaters would be mostly a non-issue.
EA doesn't care to actually moderate cheating, because that either takes ongoing money to pay people or a loss of control by releasing dedicated servers. They instead just want to pay 1 time to "automate" their "solution" to cheating... even though that pretty much never works long term.
The tech behind is quite fascinating actually. These days people use FPGA boards connected via PCIe to directly stream the memory contents to another PC. There is no cheating software on the gaming machine.
Disclaimer: I don't cheat, but these boards are the cheapest pcie fpga dev boards I could find.
For non-competitive games, that drive generally isn't there, so it probably matters a lot less.