[[Citation Needed]]. Trying to play a multiplayer game that doesn't implement effective anticheat is miserable. The arms race is unfortunate but 100% understandable, and I wouldn't play any game that doesn't implement some form of it.
In the old days, you would play multiplayer with your friends and their friends on a private server or some kind of community server where cheaters could quickly be recognized and banned by the admins. Now this communal way of playing online games is largely gone and replaced by match making which makes multiplayer basically the same as playing against cleverer bots.
Match making is more convenient, especially for lone players, and I don't think the change was done out of malice. Still, it feels like something was lost with the disappearance of private or semi-private community servers, easy policing of cheaters being one of those things.
For a game to attract the amount of people required to finance AAA gamedev it needs console matchmaking (so people can enjoy it from the first minute), it might need to allow trustworthy competitive games bevause competitions are part of marketing.
Being able to switch off the anticheats on private/community server that are policed by admins would work. But again it’s a pretty small niche.
Anti-piracy: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling the sale of products because technology has radically reduced "manufacture" and distribution costs.
Anti-cheat: trying to address the lack of abuse of trust while scaling game coordination because tech. has made massive interconnectivity possible
Anti-cryptography: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling communication tools.
I do miss the quirky nature of private servers, custom maps and game mods, and all of that, but cheating was a big problem back then too.
More probably, the point here is most anticheats are very invasive and harmful to privacy, while also degrading game performance and often being ineffective at preventing cheaters.
[Citation needed] at the last part. Of course they're not gonna prevent 100% of cheaters, but I have doubts that they don't do anything.
OP's point here was that anticheat - while necessary in practice - is particularly egregious at invading privacy and/or degrading the user's experience, which i think is fair to say goes against the free software ideal. the experience would certainly be worse without any anticheat, but that doesn't mean anticheat couldn't be better or isn't still very non-free.