Many recently have decided to refund the game, some have to because they have no choice depending on their motherboard or operating system. These are not all the cheaters, these are people who don't want to hand a third-party developer ring-0 access to their operating system and force Secure Boot on just to play a video game.
That's not paranoia, it's a reasonable line to draw, and there's real reasons for why.

That being said, I'm making this post to inform gamers - so that they can make an informed decision on if they want to take the risk, this is in no way to attack the reputation of the developers or the sales of the game, and I do have some respect that they have been quite transparent and were up front about this in their recent video: "The 11th Reason Why Not to Buy WARDOGS." Even if I believe, they didn't really go well into depth as to why this could be a major reason for why you should not.

HERE'S TWO BIG EXAMPLES OF WHY KERNEL-LEVEL ANTI-CHEAT IS EXTREMELY RISKY:

Apex Legends had a major 2024 ALGS hacking incident. During a live tournament, two pro players got hit with an RCE exploit mid-match, one had an aimbot switched on, the other saw wallhacks and a cheat overlay appear - forcing EA to postpone the finals. It was said that affected players PCs may have been exposed to a rootkit or other malicious software and recommended a clean OS reinstall, plus changing passwords immediately. Even though EAC publicly denied the vulnerability was in their software specifically, the fact that a security research group's first instinct was "wipe your OS, you may have a rootkit" tells you everything about how much trust these systems require and how bad it gets when something goes wrong.

Genshin Impact's mhyprot2.sys kernel driver got weaponized by ransomware actors to kill antivirus software system-wide, and it kept working even after the game was uninstalled, because it was a validly signed driver just sitting on the machine.

Kernel level anti-cheat is the "martial law" option for dealing with cheaters, it's a highly extreme, and invasive response to a threat most players never even personally encounter, and there are proven, less drastic alternatives. VAC and similar systems are far more limited in access, but they're not toothless. Valve's VACnet/VAC Live system, for example, catches cheaters through server-side behavioral analysis (aim patterns, reaction times, movement) rather than scanning your OS at all, and it's had real, measurable success without ever touching ring 0. Keep in mind these scans, can also be very non-privacy respecting, and kernel-level access makes that kind of overreach possible in a way user-mode software simply can't.

I hate cheaters as much as anyone, but I don't think gamers should get used to accepting kernel-level access to their PC as the normal cost of playing a multiplayer game. It hands enormous trust to the developer and the anti-cheat vendor, and it opens the door for real attackers to abuse that same access as both examples above show actually happened, not hypothetically. It's the equivalent of catching a virus from an .exe you never even ran, the only mistake was having the game installed at all.

MAIN POINT BEING: never let a third party have kernel-level access to your machine just to stop cheating in a video game.
There are better options, and the cost of crossing that line just isn't worth it.
That being said it is unlikely, but not something we should accept as a common thing in the gaming landscape.

EDIT: With that, I will only further be answer genuine questions or meaningful arguments.
Please observe this masterpiece below. its for everyone who doesnt read.