Or: Deterring some casual cheaters is not worth having my whole system pwned by employees of a game publisher and whomever else figures out how to exploit their code.

Obviously, our personal priorities differ. That's fine, but yours don't invalidate my earlier point.

By the way, it's never just one determined cheater. Once discovered, circumvention techniques get shared, just as with mod chips and exploit scripts. It's only a matter of time before anyone willing to do a little reading or buy a little hardware can use them. And they do. (Often on alt accounts, with no fear of getting banned.)

In other words, any relief from game cheaters is bound to be temporary, while harm from spyware or exploit is irreparable to anyone who values the privacy of their data.

This is why kernel-level anti-cheat systems are so widely criticized. They might make sense on dedicated gaming machines, where the risks are low, but the situation is very different on general-purpose computers.