This whole thing anti-cheat thing is just a separate problem entirely, but it's so painfully exacerbated by the first.
I'm just hoping this entire business model dies, along with the anti-cheat and everything else with it.
Does not mean:
Using anti-cheat -> poor networking
Ops comment is absolutely true. Engineers in games who are good have high incentive to 5x their salary and lifestyle by doing anything else.
This was not true in 1997. The industry also just attracts a different crowd, more adjacent to film and entertainment than it used to.
Your developers have just built and demonstrated a functioning multiplayer prototype. They want to spend 3 months to rewrite some of it for better security, and 3 months to implement the missing features and make it fully functioning. You just got off a call from a sales person for an anticheat vendor who gave you a strong pitch, so you say no to the first 3 months because it's cheaper to just add anticheat than to pay 3 months of salary on this.