There is a trade at the centre of competitive PC gaming that almost nobody states plainly, so here it is. If you want lobbies without cheaters, you have to let a games company run software with the highest level of access your operating system offers, continuously, whether or not you are playing.
Riot's Vanguard does this. It loads at boot, sits at ring 0, and it is the reason Valorant has by a wide margin the cleanest matchmaking of any major shooter. Activision's RICOCHET does something similar for Call of Duty. Valve's VAC does not, and Counter-Strike 2 has a cheating problem severe enough that new players in low-rated lobbies routinely conclude the game is broken.
Why kernel access works
Cheats have escalated. The serious ones are not injected DLLs any more; they are kernel drivers themselves, or in the most expensive cases they run on separate hardware entirely, reading the game's memory over a DMA card so that nothing on the gaming machine can see them at all. Anti-cheat that runs in user space is fighting an opponent operating a level below it, which is not a fight it can win.
Kernel anti-cheat levels the field, and it demonstrably works. Riot's approach has held up for six years and the difference in encounter rate between Valorant and CS2 is not subtle.
Why it is a genuine cost
It is also a driver with total system access, shipped by a games company, running on your machine at all times. That is real attack surface. A vulnerability in an anti-cheat driver is a privilege escalation for anyone who finds it, and there is history here across the industry. It is also a monitoring capability that players are asked to take on trust — in Riot's case, from a company wholly owned by Tencent, which carries its own set of concerns for some users.
Valve's refusal to go kernel-level is a coherent privacy position, taken by a company that also runs the operating system layer for the Steam Deck and has to think about Linux compatibility. The cost of that position is borne entirely by players who get cheated, and Valve's server-side machine learning work has not closed the gap at the lower ranks.
There is no free option
What there is not, currently, is a technical answer that gives clean lobbies without invasive software. Server-side detection helps at the top of the ladder where behavioural data is rich. It does not help the player in a casual match against someone with a DMA setup.
So it is a choice, and it should be made knowingly rather than by default. If a kernel driver from a games publisher is unacceptable to you — a legitimate position — then Counter-Strike, and accepting the cheaters, is the honest consequence. If clean matchmaking matters more, Valorant is right there. What nobody should do is install both and pretend the question does not exist.