Honeypot & statistics are a much more interesting avenue of anti-cheat to me. The most egregious cheaters tend to get banned the most quickly with these techniques (e.g. a 200-1 K/D ratio = a lot of samples per unit time).

When it comes to cheating in video games, I subscribe more to the Dune philosophy than the LOTR philosophy. The ends (experience) definitely justify the means. Making sure that all cheaters are punished ~equally regardless of the effect of their infractions is fantastic in principle, but I'd rather if we could simply remove the ones that are obviously & openly ruining the experience.

False positives suck, but there is no reason to pander to the .01% performers if you are trying to keep a multiplayer game community alive. Esports has demonstrated this is a terrible approach. We had community servers that would ban people simply for being too good before all the matchmaking stuff started up. The anti-cheat was vibes based and arguably superior to anything going on today. It wasn't "fair", but it was generally a much better experience as a player.

There was research on this published by Activision [1]. Spawning fake enemies behind the users back, inside walls, etc.

The players who react to fake enemies self-identify as cheaters.

[1]: https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/hallucinations