PC gaming has always been rife with statistical inferencing of cheating, accusations of cheating both true and false and resultant low levels of trust that do destroy gaming communities. That's with aggressive software solutions that implement an ad hoc not entirely robust form of remote attestation.

A lot of gaming migrated to consoles for this reason. They have secure remote attestation implemented properly. Accusing winners of cheating doesn't work there, and it's obvious why that results in happier and healthier gaming communities.

>We had fun in online games without kernel level nonsense.

You might of. But there was a percentage of players turned away by cheaters or even just had a bad experience one day because of one. At scale this can cause a bad experience for a ton of players so trying to stop as many cheaters as possible does matter.

>Why do I need to compromise my hardware

You don't have to compromise anything. In fact it is optimal to have the system be as secure as possible that way cheats can't mess with the game.

>How do old boomershooter communities tackle cheaters?

By limiting the rate of new players. This goes against the wishes of games who want to achieve massive growth.

>When and why do methods that work on a social graph fail or necessitate anticheat?

If people provided IDs that could work too instead of anticheat, but usually people do not want to do that just to play a game. It adds friction to the onboarding process.