GTA Online has this feeling at times. I always find it a refreshing distraction when somebody comes into a public server with obvious hacks and starts spawning bizarre weapons, vehicles, giving out money, changing the weather or day/night cycle abruptly, teleporting everyone to the same location. It's easy to leave to another server when it gets boring or frustrating, but these are the times when I put out the call on Discord for other non-currently-online friends to join me!

They were never just fun though. there were always hackers and cheaters.

Esports used to be just fun grassroots competition until Riot Games bulldozed over the nascent self-sustaining scenes and started the rat race of astroturf-bankrolling "professionalized" scenes lacking the foundation of any sort of viable business model, propped up only by VC sponsors. When those ran dry, the Saudi oil funds swooped in to buy up all the tournament rights as part of their sportswashing campaign.

Riot Games was also the one that introduced the nanny policing of "if you deviate from the squeaky clean advertiser-friendly image we stipulate, we'll make sure you have no future in the pro scene ever again" tribunal, presenting themselves as the bastion of "pre-eliminating all toxicity from online gaming", which is ironically hypocritical considering their scandals after scandals of toxic workplace culture.

Kernel spyware is at least 2 decades old, and manual scrutiny of casual participants is as old as networked competitive gaming and cheating themselves (id games had that from the start!). It has nothing to do with money.