I don’t think you can make the argument that the amount of cheaters using DMA is “just as many” as in a game with a less restrictive anti cheat, allowing cheaters to simply download a program off the internet and run it to acquire cheats. The accessibility of DMA cheats is meaningfully reduced to the point that I would guess (only conjecture here, sorry) the amount of cheaters is orders of magnitude less in an otherwise equivalent comparison.

Now, the amount of DMA cheaters may still be unacceptably high, but that’s a different statement than “the same amount as”.

So, it’s not “giving up something for nothing”, it’s giving up something for something, whether that something is adequate for the trade offs required will of course be subjective.