What's your opinion on Riot's Vanguard Anti-Cheat?

In general, video games tend to have various forms of anticheat to detect whether players are cheating or not. They exist in many forms such as:

• Network / Packet-based (sending packets from the game client to the server, where the server looks for unusual behavior)
• Signature-based (checking for tampered files/components, such as DLL files)
• Memory scanning-based (checking whether memory and registers are altered)
• Kernel-based (detecting near the hardware level for modifications for more sophisticated cheats)

Riot Games takes the extreme approach by implementing Vanguard at the kernel level. Given that eSports is a serious and highly competitive event in the video gaming community with prizes like cash, it's understandable why Riot would go to such extremes. But, there are pros and cons to this decision:

Pros:
- Fairness in the eSports community.
- Fairness in ranked matches.
- Players who do cheat are banned.

Cons:
- Limits players who want to play on other operating systems such as Mac and Linux (Steam Deck) by forcing players to use Windows.
- Privacy-invasive since kernel level access means Riot can spy on you. Some players find it more concerning since Riot's parent company is Tencent which follows a different legislation.
- Kernel level access also raises concerns over privilege escalation by malware installed on the host computer, which means top players are more likely to be targets.
- There are some false positive cases where players are flagged and banned mistakenly.

What do you think of Vanguard? Is Vanguard too extreme? Does Vanguard dissuade you from playing League (or other Riot games)? Do the cons really outweigh the pros, or do you think the pros are well-justified?