Unfortunately, the alternative to uncomfortably intrusive anti-cheat is more cheaters, because cheaters don't care about how intrusive their cheats have to be in order to evade anti-cheat. They will happily run hypervisor-level cheats.

There's certainly room for improvement on the netcode sometimes (Client-side hit registration is an absolute bone-headed design), but those won't prevent aim bots.

Server-side anti-cheat relies on heuristics and can easily be evaded. At the high level, a highly-skilled player may be indistinguishable from a cheater, so you could easily get false positives.

What is even more insane is I was playing Battlefield 1 on Linux for years, until in 2023(?) they backported "EA Anticheat" to BF1, half a decade after the game stopped getting support.

This broke what was otherwise a perfectly normal Battlefield experience. Battlefield 4 requires Punkbuster, although it can run on Linux with no issues. You have to downgrade to an older version though, since EA hasn't updated BF4 to the latest PB AC, which causes you to get kicked.

The fact that some games now come with root kits is insane. I really hope Microsoft cracks down on that nonsense.

Battlefield 4 plays great on Linux, with active servers and functional crossplay/anticheat. It's usually less than $5 on sale and satiates my transient BF urges.