I would submit that this is more an issue of trust than it is an issue of forcing client machines into compliance. Because of the industries persistent belief that anti-cheat is somehow an effective strategy, let alone a morally acceptable one, has meant that development of systems that develop player trust in others has totally atrophied.
This patterns of thinking "Well I'll just download a binary onto my clients machine and force it into compliance, then I can throw all of them into a big pot and they'll all mix just fine!" Is a kind of persistent insanity that is leading to your woes, more than it is the lack of a stiffer boot to land on the necks of client machines.
"If we just control the platform"
"If we just control the hardware"
"If we just control the software"
"If we just control everything".
"And what of tools to moderate bad actors?"
"Eh? Sure, here's a kick function."
Sure. But people want to run games on general purpose machines.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to cheat on consoles but it wasn’t a problem for us (lag switching aside; which was actually easy to detect).
Things like stadia help the platform more than consumers think; but people resoundedly rejected Stadia for a myriad of reasons.
I think everyone here paints a rosy picture of what content moderation is, and maybe we stretched our hand a bit thin regarding having enough humans involved (despite games taking 700-1400 people 4+ years to make in the first place)- but the rub is that people can’t have everything.
We can’t expect you not to try to tamper with the binaries and ruin games for others.
You can’t expect us not to try preventing it.
Because at the end of the day; people do submit reimbursement claims because of cheaters ruining their experience, and if there’s one thing that I can promise it’s that no amount of human review will ever be sufficient, we already put 70 or so humans on reviewing reports, and even then it was difficult to punish people, because if you ban someone they just buy another key from a Russian third market reseller for €3 (or if you make the game free god help you)
I'm not saying "You just need more humans to review and kick cheaters".
I'm saying that players often have the barest bones of ways, if they have anything at all, to say who they would and who they would not like to play with.
Players refunding over cheating are also refunding because, when they discover cheating, they can do absolutely nothing about it. If they're lucky, they might get to scream into the void and hope a moderator listens. Some brand new player on a $3 key just waltzed into the pool of players and everyone has to trust them as equally as everyone else. This is not how trust works.
But then how should one do it? I don't know! Precious little work has been done here. And why? Because it's been wasted on pretending that one can trust the clients machine if we just download enough malware to it.
This patterns of thinking "Well I'll just download a binary onto my clients machine and force it into compliance, then I can throw all of them into a big pot and they'll all mix just fine!" Is a kind of persistent insanity that is leading to your woes, more than it is the lack of a stiffer boot to land on the necks of client machines.