[QuarterRoy]

“The oldest mention I've found of people complaining about kernel drivers in Anti-Cheat were in an article from 2016. However the first time I saw it was when the game Valorant was released with its new Anti-Cheat Vanguard, which is still very controversial to this day. This happened in 2020.”

This goes back much further.

Sony DRM running kernel drivers was 2005 and there were video game anti-cheat programs using similar approaches around the same time.

It was also around this time that Joanna Rutkowska was giving talks at blackhat and defcon on her research (redpill and bluepill) and rootkits which led to discussion, research, and media articles on anti-cheat and other applications.