The best thing is back when Battlefield was Battlefield, it would self-regulate because most people played on self-hosted servers, so cheaters and bad actors were taken care of swiftly. But now they want their own control to put shitty bots and SBMM in the game, so here we are.

This whole game is a case of the devs making bad decisions and then instead of changing them decisions, they apply the quickest bandaid fixes they can.

Kernel anti-cheat does absolutely nothing to prevent aimbots/triggerbots, as most are run using 2 separate machines, anyway. The first machine runs the game in a totally clean and legitimate environment, but sends its video output (either using standard streaming tools like OBS or by using special hardware) to the 2nd machine. The 2nd machine runs the cheat and processes the video to detect where to aim and/or when to shoot, and sends mouse input back to the 1st machine.

And they should just make good games too, right?

The issue with "just analyze the players" is that it is VERY expensive computationally. And it causes issues with non-official servers as it drastically increases the cost of a dedicated server and makes a listen server nigh unusable.

To be clear: I do not think the kernel level anti-cheats are a consumer friendly solution. But it takes a special kind of arrogance to insist you know better than decades worth of research and work in trying to stop hacking.

It takes more work and resources to do what they're doing. They already do server side anti cheat. And realistically, this is more effective than not doing it, though it definitely still gets defeated anyway. I would say the things that it asks of the customer are not worth the trade even if they were 100% effective, but they are more effective.