None of that helps low-level play or games without meaningful progression. Continuing to use Rust as an example, because I'm most familiar with it among games with controversial anticheat: people get banned all the time. All the time. And they keep coming back with brand new Steam accounts, and continue to cheat until someone notices and an admin happens to be online. Rinse and repeat. Seemingly an infinite pool of cheaters, or finite cheaters with infinite money for new copies of the game. And it only takes a few minutes to ruin someone's week.
The most effective prevention method is probably strict gatekeeping: require a minimum hours played in wild west servers or a certain value of games owned in an account before a player can be whitelisted. Proof of investment, that kind of thing.
That kind of stuff catches legitimate users all the time. In Rust for example it's common to get kicked for "fly hacking" while jumping on vehicles. The more open-ended the game the more weird edge cases become very relevant. Especially if it has a halfway decent physics sim. Tons of ways to give players weird velocities. Then it has to account for the variance ping introduces...
Some stuff, yeah. Should be easy to check if a player has too much HP. But spoofed communication between the client and server is a tough nut to crack when you can only see what the client wants you to see. Keeping everything server-side would help but that introduces latency to every input, unacceptable for anything even moderately paced.
All thay said, it would be a lot easier to swallow the "necessary evil" argument if it actually fucking worked.
The "gourmet premium eggs" (regular eggs laid by pastured chickens instead of life-in-a-tiny-cage chickens) also barely increased in price during the covid/bird flu/supply chain price gouge excuses.
That's a very coercive relationship, I don't think there's an ethical way to implement "optional" suicide when the only alternative is the other party having total control over your life.
CTH was kicked out for saying "John Brown was right actually, killing slavers is good" and made an example of, along with thedonald way after it had been abandoned. Full "antifa is as bad as fascists" garbage but it's what the shareholders want.
And it wasn't all tankies, there were a lot of LateStageCapitalism refugees that git kicked because LSC was just straight tankie. I got kicked for suggesting that North Korea isn't good just because the West says it's bad.
People really want to be allowed to be bigots and currently Communism is "safe" to hate, so they let a few interactions color their opinion of an entire, loosely-affiliated group.
Guantanamo Bay is a pretty rough argument to hold up, considering its history of human rights abuse and the fact that it's stolen land from another sovereign state. ("Perpetual lease" for a fucking pittance. Bullying weak neighbors more like.) Not exactly on a clear moral high ground.
I did literally use the word "hypothetical" to couch my statement. It should probably be reserved for people whose existence is dangerous to society as part of a larger movement, cult leaders or treasonous generals or some such that have a substantial influence beyond their confinement. I know: martyrdom, you can't kill an idea, etc. Not sure I buy it.
It's not that cut-and-dry. Yes the monetary cost is higher, mostly due to appeals and such and I'm not suggesting we do things to make the conviction and sentence less certain. But there's an argument to be made that a lifetime of solitary imprisonment, necessary for this hypothetical criminal, is more cruel than death.
From a strict utilitarian "this person is an active threat to the lives of others and cannot be rehabilitated" perspective, I get it. We kill wild animals for a lot less. Given perfect knowledge I don't have a hard line against execution.
But that's a hell of a hypothetical. Lots of violence is circumstantial and not necessarily and indication of future behavior, especially if we actually gave a shit about mental health and improving the living conditions of struggling people. Far too many convictions are improper or outright incorrect. Society should have a responsibility to care for the worst of itself. It all stacks up to "do we trust ourselves, and our government, with something so extreme and irreversible?"
"If we hold the country hostage, they'll definitely do what I want before the opposition makes everything irreversibly worse."