> AMD also openly said that they are patching game engine code, which is just bizarre. Not sure what the thought process was

Hasn’t it been true for ages that GPU drivers contain fixes for a lot of GPU instructions from popular games that would otherwise be broken.

In that case, if they are used to fixing games already, it might not seem a big step from their side when they decided to also patch game code that runs on the CPU. It was unfortunate that they did not realise this would lead to triggering anti-cheat systems in games though.

But there is history of others altering program code too. For example Microsoft Windows included code specific to various pieces of software that would otherwise be broken. I wonder if that ever lead to trigger anti-cheat systems in any games.