Really, if keyboards and mice were more accepted components of those that developers always accounted for, I would just buy a console for gaming (except all my old games, but really, that wouldn't be hard to handle on a console either).
It's already a little concerning to me that I play games on my main PC for the same reasons you most likely are worried about it. As it is, I try to keep it to things on Steam and the occasional old dosbox game from GOG, so at least I don't have to be hyper aware of all the different individual launcher capabilities.
Companies get most of it from either filter drivers or ETW. Which effectively give a callback and notification for every handle or handle operation (So Networking, File, Registry, InterProcess, etc...). The good way to do this is ETW which gives you events and doesn't allow changing of these events, unlike a filter driver that can modify these requests. And this stops 99 % of people. ETW even runs in usermode as opposed to a driver.
They also do malware techniques such as loading shellcode over the wire so it's difficult to audit the actual malicious stuff they're doing.
There's zero reason for them to need anything like what Riot does with Vanguard and it's a joke that consumers allow this. It's them trying to jump to the top of the stack and abuse Kernel. But they're engineers are to stupid to realize this opens up complexity in the architecture and makes it easier to break and bypass.
At the end of the day it’s about trust. If you don’t trust Riot to run lol.exe then you definitely shouldn’t run their service! But if you trust Riot enough to run lol.exe it can do anything to your computer. The difference between lol.exe running in the foreground and something else running in the background is negligible from a security standpoint.
If you run everything in a single account what you say is true, but at least some people do use basic sandboxing methods like described above, which makes kernel-mode anti-cheat much more invasive.
1) XBox Gamepass offers a huge library of often new games for a cheap rate. That service is also available on Xbox consoles but those are much less popular than their competition.
2) Epic Games offers a bunch of games for free to entice people into switching over from steam, not sure about the current situation though.
3) Steam often offers very deep discounts on games and due to the relative ease you can buy keys from resellers you can get games for super cheap.
As an annectode I was able to get my girlfriend 250€ worth of expansions for sims for less than 40€, discounts this deep are hard to get on console.
It would be very unwise to entrust your main system to any of these companies, which is exactly what you are doing when installing modern anti-cheat software.
Another option I have considered is setting up a gaming VM with GPU pass through. A totally separate system would be more secure, but the latency may be better with a VM, and working with VMs might be a bit more convenient I think.
I have been curious about the security of hardware (or just GPU) pass through with VMs though, I am not sure how safe or dangerous giving direct hardware access could be in the worst case. There is the issue of some anti-cheat software detecting when it's being ran inside of a VM also.