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the threat is people who cheat in games. obfuscation slows them down, but incurs a performance cost. this work is focused on reducing the performance cost.

- from the slides

Exactly. That and in game currencies. You like competing in games, or for game-bucks? Well you need some level of obfuscation and hardening to make that viable.

From my understanding the goal is to prevent pirates and hackers from modifying the game's binary.

I have no idea why would anyone want to do that on Nintendo Switch though, Switch 1 doesn't have any headroom and Switch 2 OS security hasn't been defeated yet.

It also frustrates datamining of secret client-side game mechanics, story spoilers, and unreleased content (good branch management is not priority for some devs). Yeah this wouldn't stand up to the best of the best, but not all game communities have a George Hotz, so this suffices for most cases.